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A Civil War May Be Brewing In The Democratic Party

Tuesday's primary results weren't just a bad night for the Democratic establishment. They were a warning shot that the party's socialist insurgency has arrived, is organized, and intends to win. And the problem for them is that they have no idea what to do about it, which could spark a civil war within the party.

On election morning, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani joins former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander as he campaigns for Congress outside of an election polling center, June 23, 2026 in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

The Democratic Socialists of America have been running their own long game inside the Democratic Party for years. Now DSA NYC co-chair Gustavo Gordillo is willing to say the quiet part out loud. The DSA runs candidates on the Democratic ballot line, wins primaries, and places members inside Democratic caucuses. The difference is that they don't answer to the party apparatus or its donor class.

"Our candidates run as Democrats," Gordillo said. "We're on the Democratic Party ballot line. We contest the primaries, and when they're in the legislature, they're part of the Democratic Party caucus. But we don't agree with the way the Democratic Party establishment organizes or runs its party apparatus."

Gordillo identified a contradiction at the core of the party's identity. "There's a problem in the Democratic Party where they are funded by billionaire donors and at the same time they're trying to represent the working class," he said. "And in our opinion you have to choose between the billionaire class and the working class. It's just impossible to satisfy all of them."

This is the DSA co-chair. Let me summarize what he says in this video: We're using the Democratic Party as a ballot-access vehicle, not because we share its goals. We build our own organization, get elected under the Democratic label, caucus with Democrats when it's useful, pic.twitter.com/zYwsv4J8Bt

— The Undercurrent (@NotTheirScript) June 24, 2026

Establishment Democrats aren't happy about this. "If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don't run for our nomination," former DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison said in a post on X. "Don't use our resources. Don't rely on our volunteers. Don't use our infrastructure. Don't ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign."

Harrison argued that the Democratic Socialists of America should focus on "building the party you actually support."

Others are clearly concerned that the rise of DSA-linked candidates will hurt the Democratic Party.

"All of us are a little frustrated with the Democratic Party. But you don't blow it up," New York Attorney General Letitia James said.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, both of whom represent New York, were unable to stop what happened, and now both are in serious political trouble. Jeffries was lucky in that Mamdani steered the DSA away from running a primary challenger against him. However, he may not be spared in a future election. Supporters of Tuesday's victorious socialist candidates made the long-term stakes clear, chanting "you're next" in reference to Jeffries after Tuesday's victories.

Even moderates within the party are running out of patience and pinning the blame on the party leadership. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), considered a more moderate Democrat, suggested Thursday that both Jeffries and Schumer may need to step aside, framing the problem in terms that should embarrass both men. "To me, the lesson was simple. Democrats had too many priorities. They tried to make everyone happy and answer every question. When you prioritize everything, no one knows what you actually stand for," Slotkin told Stephen A. Smith on SiriusXM's "Straight Shooter with Stephen A."

She contrasted that with Donald Trump's 2024 approach. "He said, 'I'm going to make your life more affordable. I'm going to put more money in your pocket.' ... He won because he kept his message simple and focused on the issue Americans cared most about."

A year and a half after the 2024 election, the party still hasn't settled on a direction. "That's why I believe we need significant new leadership," Slotkin said. "The old models are no longer working, and that includes the Democratic Party."

Sure enough, Politico reports that moderate Democrats are "sounding the alarm after massive losses in New York's primaries."

The far left is eyeing even bigger targets in key battleground primaries that will determine control of Congress as well as governorships in crucial swing states. Most immediately, moderates fear that a progressive primary sweep could imperil the party's hopes of beating Republicans this fall.

They also have a more fundamental fear: that progressives are becoming more mainstream as they keep winning - reshaping the Democratic Party.

The socialists are winning this civil war, and they're just getting started. Colorado Democrats head into their own primaries carrying the same internal contradictions. Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros is challenging longtime incumbent Diana DeGette in a district the establishment considers safely theirs. In the 8th District, progressive-aligned Manny Rutinel faces establishment-backed Shannon Bird, with the winner eventually squaring off against freshman Rep. Gabe Evans (R-Colo.).

The progressive candidates may not sweep those races, but the political damage lands either way. Republicans will link centrist Democrats to the party's most radical voices regardless of who holds which seat. Policy ideas like defunding the police or abolishing prisons entirely energize the activist base and repel competitive-district voters in equal measure. GOP candidates will make sure general election voters in Colorado know exactly what the rest of the Democratic coalition is demanding.

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 18:05

US SNAP Payment-Error-Rate Hits High Of 10.62%

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

The national payment error rate for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) hit 10.62 percent for Fiscal Year (FY) 2025, far exceeding the 6 percent threshold set by Congress.

“While this is a modest decrease from FY 2024, the FY 2025 rate still shows significant waste at the state level,“ the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) said in a June 24 statement.

”Including both overpayments and underpayments, this year’s rate represents a collective $10.1 billion in improper payments nationwide.”

The payment error rate measures how accurately states calculate SNAP eligibility and the amounts that beneficiaries receive.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump last year, established a State Quality Control Incentive provision under which states must pay a percentage of SNAP program bills if their payment error rate exceeds a certain limit.

A state with an error rate of 6 percent to 8 percent will be required to fund 5 percent of the benefits. This scales up as error rates get higher. States with error rates of 10 percent or more must fund 15 percent of benefits.

“[This has instituted] real financial consequences for states that mismanage taxpayer dollars,” the USDA stated, noting that these rules could come into effect as soon as Oct. 1, 2027.

States with error rates exceeding 6 percent are also required to submit a Corrective Action Plan to the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, explaining how they intend to address the root causes of the high error rates. Some states may end up getting financially penalized.

“These payment error rates are further proof that state accountability is severely lacking in SNAP,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said.

“USDA has taken historic action to help interested states curb SNAP waste, and I hope other states, regardless of political leadership, prioritize needy families and the American taxpayer over politics.”

Tackling Error Rates

A June report from the American Public Human Services Association detailed the results of a survey conducted among all 50 state SNAP agencies between May 19 and June 5, which was aimed at understanding how the agencies planned to improve their payment accuracy.

Out of the 39 states that responded to questions on state capacity and operational readiness, 92 percent said they had already completed a root cause analysis of the error rates or that such an effort was underway.

“States reported that payment errors stem from both participant and administrative factors, with responses suggesting errors are roughly evenly distributed between the two,” the report reads.

Many states have increased or are considering boosting their workforce, expanding training, adopting new technologies, and strengthening quality assurance functions to identify and avoid errors.

Commenting on the FY 2025 SNAP payment error rates, Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Chairman Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.) said efforts must be taken to ensure that the program is administered in a fair, accurate, and responsible manner, according to a June 24 statement from the committee.

“It is clear that improvements were needed to ensure SNAP is administered as intended to support those truly in need while protecting taxpayer dollars,” Boozman said.

“I applaud the states that are implementing innovative solutions to decrease error rates and be good stewards of federal funds. The reforms included in the Working Families Tax Cuts were designed to promote accountability for significant mismanagement.”

Working Families Tax Cuts refer to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

SNAP Changes

States and federal officials are making SNAP food purchase rules more stringent to direct beneficiaries toward healthier choices.

Beginning this fall, SNAP-authorized retailers are required to stock more nutritious items across four food categories—produce, protein, dairy, and grains.

Almost a dozen states also plan to ban beneficiaries from buying energy drinks, candy, and soda using SNAP coupons over the coming months.

However, on June 22, a federal judge blocked the USDA from restricting SNAP beneficiaries in five states from buying sugary foods or drinks.

The states—Colorado, Iowa, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Nebraska—had previously received USDA approval to impose such restrictions. The judge ruled that the department lacked the authority to approve these food restriction waivers.

A USDA spokesperson defended the department’s actions.

“The idea that taxpayer funds should not be used to purchase junk food should not be controversial,” the spokesperson said.

“USDA will not be backing down from the fight to Make America Healthy Again, including for ​families and communities reliant on ​SNAP.”

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 17:30

"Iran Is Not Really A Threat To The US"; Curt Mills On Pulling The Chips Off The Table Re:Hormuz

President Trump's Iran agreement remains under pressure after a fresh round of retaliatory strikes by the U.S. in and around the Strait of Hormuz. Iran allegedly targeted a commercial cargo ship with attack drones, U.S. forces responded by striking Iranian missile, drone, and radar sites.

So the ceasefire is shaky but it seems …..

Against that backdrop, last night, American Conservative executive director Curt Mills and Will Chamberlain of the Article III Project joined prolific author Michael Malice to debate whether Trump struck the right deal, whether preserving stability in the Strait of Hormuz justifies the concessions to Tehran, and what the agreement means for the factional battle within the Republican party… also Israel :)

Below were the highlights for those short on time:

Voting Dems over Neocons in ‘28

The Iran war (and how a deal pans out) will have an effect on the future of the Republican Party, but the old guard retaking power could simply leave millions done with voting…

Mills said he supported Trump because he represented "a different type of conservatism," warning that if the GOP simply reverts to "Jeb Bushism, Scott Walkerism, Mitt Romneyism," then "I'm just not that interested in the project."

Chamberlain challenged Mills' past comments about voting for Ro Khanna over Marco Rubio, calling the idea "crazy" and accusing Mills of "enabling communists." Mills responded that if Republicans nominate "the absolute worst nominee for my interests," such as Rubio or Ted Cruz, while Democrats nominate "the only one that I feel like is responding and speaking plain English," then "yeah, I would consider it,” which Chamberlain deemed  “insane."

pic.twitter.com/OMmAQa0FH7

— ZeroHedge Debates (@zerohedgeDebate) June 27, 2026 Side Debate: Deport Mehdi Hasan?

Chamberlain argued strongly for denaturalizing and deporting foreign born “commies,” namely Mehdi Hasan, Ilhan Omar, and the like.

Recently naturalized citizens who are hostile to the United States, he said, should lose their citizenship, saying, "Communism is where everything has its limit."

Hasan may suck, Mills countered, but he’s not a communist."Do you think Mehdi Hasan is a Marxist-Leninist... who has deep opinions about Trotsky versus Stalin?” Mills added that deporting legal residents over heated political disputes is a dangerous path and against the “American Spirit”.

Chamberlain still held that Hasan is "extraordinarily hostile to America and its interests... I think that he should be deported. He's a British Islamist." 

pic.twitter.com/DwsxHVHSUe

— ZeroHedge Debates (@zerohedgeDebate) June 27, 2026

We highly recommend the full debate included below. Also feel free to watch on YouTube or listen on Spotify.

https://t.co/PgdhEZ2LUX

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 26, 2026 Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 16:55

Russiagate Prosecutor Calls Audible On 'Grand Conspiracy'

Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClearWire,

Although Donald Trump's defenders describe the Russia hoax and other efforts to frame the president as a "grand conspiracy," RealClearInvestigations has learned that the man now leading the probe of that scandal is pursuing multiple conspiracy prosecutions that are smaller and more manageable, according to several sources with direct knowledge of the probe.

Since taking over the Justice Department's far-flung investigation in April, veteran prosecutor Joseph diGenova and his team quickly concluded that combining all of the alleged wrongdoing, which ranges from falsifying evidence and committing perjury to leaking classified information and obstructing justice, into one unified plot and trying them together as a single case would be unmanageable.

"You'd have 50 defendants in the courtroom," said a well-placed source familiar with diGenova's thinking.

Before diGenova took over the investigation two months ago, its contours were ill-defined as it lurched ahead in fits and starts for more than a year. But according to the sources, diGenova is tackling the case with a new, disciplined focus and in so doing is giving it the direction it's lacked.

But this is a change in tactics, not the theory of the case. The sources say his operating assumption is that Trump's enemies in the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, the Obama and Biden administration, some Democrats in Congress, and their like-minded accomplices across several government agencies - including the CIA and the FBI - joined in one continuous conspiracy over almost a decade to deny Trump his civil rights, derail his political campaigns, and undermine his presidency.

Holistic Review

Where other investigators have looked at specific pieces of the effort Trump's defenders now call "Russiagate" after its original origins, diGenova is launching the first holistic look at the entire scandal. A well-placed source said it is looking at events from June 2015 when Trump first came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy through the 2022 FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago after he left office.

Insider sources provided RCI with an exclusive look into the specially assigned prosecutor's office and its recent legal maneuvers.

They said two separate grand juries in South Florida are now collecting and hearing evidence in what could become a series of conspiracy cases brought against people who served in the highest reaches of government, including former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former FBI Director James Comey.

Since much of the government's alleged corrupt anti-Trump activity took place in 2016, prosecuting the cases as conspiracies is the only way to get around the five-year federal statute of limitations.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche tapped diGenova, a longtime denizen of Washington, D.C., who was a U.S. attorney during the Reagan administration, to helm the sprawling investigation into what Blanche views as a series of baseless and seditious prosecutions and impeachments of Trump. The acting attorney general has created a special position for diGenova with the title "counselor to the attorney general."

DiGenova has moved into an office in Fort Pierce, Fla., where one federal grand jury is actively hearing evidence in the case. Another grand jury has been convened in Miami, where Jason Reding Quinones, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, is based. He is said to be working closely with diGenova.

DiGenova and his team are confident that the jury pool and judges in South Florida will give them a fair hearing, as opposed to Washington, D.C., where they are no longer utilizing a third grand jury.

"It's dead in D.C. Everything is in South Florida now," a red jurisdiction more sympathetic to Trump, said a senior U.S. official briefed on the matter.

As a former federal prosecutor and independent counsel, diGenova is known for using grand juries, which are comprised of 16 to 23 citizens who hear a prosecutor's case, to aggressively collect evidence by issuing subpoenas for documents and witnesses.

The sources say a fresh round of grand jury subpoenas is expected to go out in early July.

New Documents & Whistleblowers

These well-placed sources also say that diGenova has cultivated several new witnesses, including whistleblowers from the intelligence community and the FBI, and that his team has also uncovered significant new evidence, including a massive FBI document spanning several hundred pages that reportedly exposes new malfeasance in the bureau's probe of Trump's alleged ties to Russia, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, which was begun before the 2016 election.

They note that diGenova traveled to D.C. earlier this month to meet with both Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel to discuss the newly discovered internal FBI document and map out new investigative leads as well as a new overall case strategy.

Led by former FBI chief Comey, Crossfire investigators targeted the 2016 Trump campaign for colluding with the Kremlin and illegally wiretapped at least one Trump adviser based on political opposition research from the Hillary Clinton campaign. After Trump won the election, the same now-debunked research, known as the Steele dossier, was used by Comey and then-CIA Director John Brennan in a U.S. intelligence report known as the "ICA" to recast his victory as the product of Kremlin espionage.

By laundering the dossier - the heart of the Russia collusion scheme - through the U.S. intelligence community, the outgoing Obama administration was able to give it a gloss of credibility. By design, this false information made its way into the media, which in turn prompted Congress to open inquiries and the DOJ to appoint Robert Mueller as special counsel to continue the investigation on a larger scale. DiGenova, sources say, is examining whether Mueller's team engaged in prosecutorial abuses against Trump officials and associates.

Comey and Brennan were subpoenaed earlier this year regarding their roles in the ICA and are key targets in the conspiracy investigation. Both have denied any wrongdoing, publicly and through their lawyers.

Now in command of the entire investigation, diGenova has his own budget and is rapidly "staffing up" office, including hiring a large team of deputy prosecutors, investigators, analysts, and researchers, said a DOJ official with eyes into his operation.

The Justice Department official told RCI that his Florida team will not move forward with indictments without confidence that they can prevail in a court of law.

"We're not going to bring indictments just to make ourselves feel good only to lose and give the bad guys a victory," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. "So it's a lot of work. But that's what we're doing."

Currently, no indictments are under seal, the official said.

Past Probes

The official said that diGenova's team now has "all the files" collected by Special Counsel John Durham, who conducted a multiyear criminal investigation of the FBI's Russia probe. These include long-sought notes from several hours of interviews with Brennan about his role in the ICA and Crossfire Hurricane.

One DOJ official told RCI that diGenova's investigation is necessary, in part, because Durham "took a dive." The official noted that Durham only secured a single conviction during his four-year probe - of former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty to a felony false-statement offense in connection with his admittedly falsifying government records in pursuit of a wiretap on former Trump adviser Carter Page.

Although Durham sought up to six months in prison, arguing that Clinesmith, a liberal Democrat, acted out of "political or personal bias" against Trump, D.C. District Judge Jeb Boasberg spared him any jail time and let him work off his probationary sentence by helping edit a D.C. homeless-advocacy journal he followed. The D.C. Bar reinstated his law license soon after.

Trump's supporters say Durham's record shows he did not pursue his investigation vigorously, while Trump's critics say his largely dead-end case proves the Russia probe was justified and done by the book.

"DiGenova has been appointed to investigate a made-up deep-state plot," said Harvard attorney and legal analyst Anna Bower.

While the legal strategy may have changed, diGenova and his team are still following the same theory of the case and pursuing potential charges under the same conspiracy statutes, the sources say - namely Sections 371 and 242 of the U.S. criminal code.

Weaponizing Justice

They believe high-ranking officials in the Obama and Biden administrations, acting under color of law, unlawfully weaponized the U.S. justice system and intelligence community against Trump and his advisers in a seditious plot to derail his candidacy and presidency and subvert the will of the American electorate.

Adding to the case's complexity is the FBI's disparate treatment of Hillary Clinton, who was personally exonerated by Comey in the bureau's investigation of her emails, codenamed Midyear Exam. The move cleared legal hurdles for her just weeks before her nomination at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. At the same time, recently declassified FBI documents reveal that Comey's deputy, Andrew McCabe, scuttled the FBI's Clinton Foundation probe and other investigations tied to Clinton.

Soon after letting Clinton off the hook, according to the operating theory of the case, they opened the Crossfire Hurricane espionage case on Trump as an alleged "insurance policy" in the unlikely event that Clinton lost the election, suggesting an illegal plan to abuse law enforcement to frame the Republican candidate. Recently declassified documents reveal Comey was aware of the Clinton plan to set up Trump as a Russian conspirator. Nonetheless, the FBI went after Trump based on a narrative they knew to be politically motivated and most likely bogus, which proved to be the case.

The sources confirmed that diGenova and his team are looking closely at the FBI's apparent double standard of justice employed during the 2016 campaign. And they have already found "fertile ground" there for possible conspiracy charges.

Another central focus of diGenova's team, according to an insider briefed on the matter, is the Obama-ordered ICA and the seeming political manufacturing of U.S. intelligence to frame the incoming president as a Kremlin puppet in early 2017.

The intelligence assessment's post-election conclusion that Russia interfered in the election to help Trump, which happened to be the key allegation of the Clinton-funded dossier, contradicted the intelligence community's own pre-election finding that Russia had not favored Trump and instead sought to sow discord in the American electoral process.

Comey and Brennan pushed for inclusion of the dossier in the ICA over the objections of career analysts.

In addition to Comey and Brennan, a Florida grand jury has subpoenaed McCabe's top aide, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok, the counterintelligence official who led the Crossfire probe and who also interacted with the CIA during the drafting of the ICA. Both have maintained their innocence.

Also in the crosshairs, the sources say, is James Clapper, who spearheaded the ICA as former President Obama's intelligence czar and who has received a subpoena. So, too, is Lisa Monaco, who served as a top Obama aide in the White House before former President Biden appointed her deputy AG, where she oversaw the raid of Mar-a-Lago. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Persons of Interest

Key witnesses and subjects in the Florida-based grand jury investigations, the sources say, include: FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten, who was instrumental in several Trump-related investigations and rubber-stamped the dossier's use in applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants targeting Carter Page; Celeste Wallander, a top Obama White House aide and Russian analyst later appointed to the Pentagon by President Biden; former CIA analyst and Biden aide Eric Ciaramella, who secretly worked with then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) on the first impeachment of Trump as the so-called "anonymous whistleblower;" former Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who worked with Ciaramella and Schiff to facilitate the first impeachment; former Clapper aide Vinh Nguyen, who helped craft the sections of the ICA dealing with Russian cyber threats; and former National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers, who clashed with Brennan and Clapper during the manufacturing of the ICA.

As a cooperating witness, Rogers has already told investigators some alarming new information, according to the sources. In April, ODNI issued criminal referrals to DOJ for both Ciaramella and Atkinson over their role in the first Trump impeachment concerning Ukraine in 2019.

DiGenova, who is licensed to practice law in D.C. but not Florida, won't likely argue any cases in court and will assume a supervisory role as cases are litigated. A Republican, diGenova got his start in Washington in the 1970s as a lawyer working on the Church Committee, a select Senate committee tasked with investigating CIA and FBI abuses. In the 1980s, he served as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, where he supervised numerous public corruption and national security cases and earned a reputation as a results-oriented prosecutor.

In 1992, diGenova was appointed independent counsel to investigate the Bush administration's possibly illegal search of Bill Clinton's passport. After two years on the case, he brought no criminal charges. In 1996, he and his wife founded the diGenova & Toensing law firm in Washington.

At 81, the gravel-voiced, mustachioed diGenova still appears spry. Colleagues told RCI they are cautiously optimistic that he will get results.

"He is totally sharp and hard-charging," said DOJ Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, who until recently also ran the anti-weaponization task force at DOJ.

However, the clock is ticking. DiGenova will have to secure convictions or guilty pleas before January 2029, when a Democratic administration could take over the DOJ and quash any indictments and prosecutions.

The DOJ official close to diGenova's office said the appointment of a special prosecutor to ride herd on the wide-ranging investigation should have been done a year ago, but then-Attorney General Pam Bondi was reluctant to take such risks.

"She was frightened by the entire thing," he said. "She was way out of her depth."

RCI has reached out to Bondi for comment. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami did not respond to requests for a statement.

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 16:20

Apple Wants To Buy Memory From China As Soaring Chip Prices Spark Inflation Shock

Last Thursday, in the aftermath of Apple's biggest one day plunge since Liberation Day, and second biggest single-day drop ever...

.... when the company lost over a quarter trillion dollars in market cap after the company's unprecedented price increase announcement  which for some products was as much as 50% as Apple decided to pass on soaring component costs to consumers, following similar moves from other consumer electronics companies....

...  and which Apple blamed on "unsustainable" prices by the memory cartel - namely SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron and Sandisk - who have been flooded with unprecedented demand from hyperscalers (freshly funded with hundreds of billions in newly-issued investment grade debt) we predicted that "China's memory makers are waiting by the phone" for a disgruntled Tim Cook to call, demanding bulk, cheaper RAM.

*APPLE SHARES CLOSE DOWN 6.1% IN BIGGEST DROP SINCE APRIL 2025

China's memory makers are waiting by the phone

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 25, 2026

To be sure, Apple wasn't alone: just hours later Microsoft also announced it was raising Xbox prices, in effect launching an avalanche of memory-driven price increases across the industry, now that it has been normalized to pass on soaring memory prices to consumers.

This, in turn, takes place following a series of reports - initially on this website almost a month ago which showed that the recent surge in core inflation is largely due to runaway chip/memory prices as Apple has since confirmed...

At what point does Trump start raging at soaring memory prices

PPI Electronic Components is pulling entire core index higher pic.twitter.com/v9ufHmx0gG

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 11, 2026

... followed last week by the WSJ also joining the chorus by reporting that "the Data-Center Boom is sparking a third wave of inflation."

Fast forward to this morning when with AI stocks tumbling as "check/capex payers", including AAPL, get crushed, while "check/capex receivers" soar...

Hyperscalers vs Chips pic.twitter.com/qtYEDM8lQ7

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 25, 2026

... the abovementioned Chinese memory makers did not have long to wait, and overnight the FT reported that Apple is lobbying the Trump administration for clearance to buy memory chips from CXMT, a Chinese company that the Pentagon as put on a blacklist because of alleged connections to the People’s Liberation Army. 

As we expected, the iPhone maker has been waging a lobbying campaign to get the White House’s blessing in order to ease the financial pressure of the rise in memory chip prices. A person told the FT that Apple approached the commerce department more than a month ago, but the tech company has been targeting other officials across the administration and allies in Washington.

Apple is not barred from buying chips from China's DDR giant CXMT, or YMTC, another Chinese memory chipmaker which focuses on NAND memory and has been growing its market share aggressively, having caught up to Sandisk, and set to become the world's 3rd largest maker of flash memory as soon as this quarter 

But the Pentagon has put both companies on its Chinese Military Company blacklist. The so-called 1260H list contains dozens of Chinese groups with alleged ties to the PLA that undermine US national security.

Securing CXMT as a memory supplier would help remedy a situation in which the tech giant is being squeezed by its own suppliers, a position in which Apple has never been before .

The lobbying campaign comes after President Donald Trump met his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing last month. Ahead of the summit, and in the months ahead of their previous meeting in South Korea in October, the US has held back from introducing new technology-related export controls that would affect Chinese companies.

As the FT notes, the Pentagon’s 1260H list creates reputational risk for companies, but in most cases it has no legal ramifications. We said as much just hours earlier when we said that those "worried about Chinese memory roadblocks by the US govt to ease memory inflation forget Trump undid 40 years of Iranian sanctions to lower the price of oil." And now that oil price inflation is contained, Trump has memory-driven cost-push inflation to fix ahead of the midterms, and whether he wants to or not, the only option his Admin has - besides imposing a price ceiling on memory (which may still come) - is to agree with Apple's request.

Last year, when memory prices were far lower and domestic producers did not have their customers by the throat with record chip prices and chip inflation was not yet the biggest driver of core prices, the commerce department added CXMT to a package of Chinese groups it intended to place on a trade blacklist called the “Entity List”. But the White House told it to hold off on new export controls because the administration was in the middle of tough negotiations with China to try to reach a truce in the trade war.

In any case, the FT notes that it remains unclear if Apple would get any guarantee from the administration, especially a promise that the US would not later put CXMT on the Entity List. Trump last year agreed to let Nvidia sell advanced H200 chips to China, a move many of his officials opposed.

In February, the Pentagon updated the 1260H list before withdrawing it within an hour. Several people said it was removed because the White House was angry that someone at the Pentagon had taken CXMT and YMTC off the list. When the Pentagon re-released it this month, both of the Chinese memory chip manufacturers had been reinstated.

“Apple choosing to partner with a Chinese military company would be a grave mistake,” John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the House China committee, told the FT. However, he expect that the Republican will rapidly change his tune once there is public outcry in a the next few weeks against soaring electronic component prices, which will ultimately be blamed on runaway memory costs. 

“Helping the [Chinese Communist Party] succeed in its plans to dominate critical supply chains will make our country’s tech industry and economy more dependent on China at a time when we must build secure tech supply chains with our allies,” Moolenaar said, seemingly unaware that by not using Chinese components, he is allowing South Korea's memory cartel dictate not only US inflation but also the country's monetary policy, now that even Fed officials are pointing to AI/memory prices as key inflation drivers.

• *KASHKARI: INFLATION DRIVEN BY SUPPLY ISSUES, INCLUDING AI-BUILD

Readers may recall that back in 2022 - when the world's faced another major surge in chip and component prices due to the logistical nightmare following covid - Apple faced a backlash when it considered buying memory chips from YMTC for iPhones to be sold in China. Marco Rubio, who was then the top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, told the FT that “Apple was playing with fire”. Back then Rubio added that Apple would be “subject to scrutiny like it has never seen from the federal government” if it proceeded to procure YMTC chips. However, back in 2022, memory hadn't emerged as the biggest source of rising core inflation. It has now, and should Rubio refuse to pivot on his position, he would promptly become the target of public ire over surging consumer goods prices. 

Yet even with Tim Cook, and soon all other US consumer electronics products makers pushing hard for alternative memory sources, the memory lobby won't give up easily on the (temporary) oligopolistic position the commodity makers have achieved. “It makes no sense for the administration to decouple America’s reliance on critical minerals from China, only to approve new dependencies in a field as critical as AI,” said Michael Sobolik, a security expert at the Hudson Institute. 

One former official warned the US risked losing another industry by letting Apple buy memory from a group that receives Chinese subsidies. “Trump can show the courage to keep American memory alive for our security and our competitiveness or pour it down the drain so [Apple chief executive] Tim Cook can squeeze out a few more points of margin.”

It wouldn't surprise us if the "unnamed former official" is on South Korea's payroll because while China is still a modest actor in the memory space, the actual giants are all located in South Korea: Apple relies on US chipmaker Micron in addition to South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix for the DRAM memory used in its devices.

Meanwhile, in advance of a historic flood of orders that could send its market cap soaring, we reported that China's DRAM giant CXMT has received regulatory approval to list in Shanghai for the largest mainland IPO since 2022 as the Chinese national champion positions itself to challenge the DRam incumbents. The IPO of its domestic NAND peer, YMCT, is set to follow just weeks later 

Oh, and for those confused what happens when a commodity price surges, the post-covid case study should serve well: in 2023, DRAM prices because of a supply glut. This was a boon for buyers such as Apple, which was able to secure massive amounts of cheap inventory. 

But the AI boom of the past three years has seen a reversal in fortunes for the memory suppliers. As hyperscalers spent hundreds of billions of dollars for AI infrastructure, demand for advanced DRam — known as HBM — has led to a protracted shortage of traditional memory for consumer electronics. 

However, now that the market has shown it will no longer reward ridiculous amounts of hyperscaler capex spending - a U-turn from the market's reaction function for much of the past year - especially now that most of the big chip spenders no longer generatepositive cash flow and forced to issue billions in new debt for every incremental order of memory...

... in the end it won't be Trump that decides the fate of memory prices: it will be hyperscalers' own shareholders who will eagerly punish their management teams for incremental capex spending, forcing these companies to come up with new and creative ways to use and optimize existing Ram (likely in the form of many more Software-driven TurboQuant moments) to come up with more efficient and faster models.

In any case, after soaring into the stratosphere for the past year courtesy of all Hyperscaler free cash flow and hundreds of billions in on and off balance sheet debt, the party is finally ending and the memory bubble is about to burst. 

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 15:10

Ukraine Closes Week Of Record Drone Attacks On Russia By Hitting Important Weapons Plant

Ukraine announced Saturday that it used its Flamingo cruise missiles overnight to strike Russia's Titan-Barrikady weapons plant, which reportedly manufactures parts for its powerful Oreshnik missile.

The military plant is in Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, which is a major industrial city in southwest Russia. Writing on X, President Zelensky described it as a "major industrial complex" where Russia "produces artillery systems and specialized military equipment, including components for missile launch systems."

Getty Images

"Every Russian defense facility involved in the war against Ukraine is a legitimate target for our long-range strikes," he wrote.

The Associated Press reports, "Volgograd Gov. Andrei Bocharov confirmed an attack on a business in the region’s Krasnooktyabrsky district, saying 10 people had been wounded and taken to a hospital. He said production facilities at the site were damaged but did not identify the company."

Additionally, "Ukraine's state security service said Saturday morning that Ukrainian forces also struck an oil pumping facility in Russia’s Vladimir region that supplies fuel to Moscow, for the second time this month."

But on the other side of the border, Ukrainian media reports that Russia was also busy with now nightly airstrikes:

Russian forces targeted production facilities belonging to the Naftogaz Group, Ukraine's largest national oil and gas company, in the Poltava and Kharkiv regions.

The barrage of attacks included 129 drones, of which 113 were destroyed or jammed by Ukrainian forces, Ukrainian media reported.

The Russian overnight attacks on Ukraine killed two people and injuring more than 20, according to state officials.

At a moment much of the globe's attention remains fixated on Iran and the fate of energy shipping through the largely blocked Strait of Hormuz, the Ukraine war is rapidly escalating.

Footage shows Ukrainian FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile launches and precision strikes on the Titan-Barrikady Plant in Volgograd, Russia.

Titan-Barrikady, officially known as JSC Federal Scientific and Production Center "Titan-Barrikady," is responsible for producing heavy… pic.twitter.com/xTYF2k2dLy

— OSINTWarfare (@OSINTWarfare) June 27, 2026

Ukrainian leadership has issued some astounding stats on the escalation on its side of the border:

Russia attacked Ukraine with 1,400 drones and 1,500 guided bombs

President Volodymyr Zelensky stated on Saturday, June 27, that Russian forces deployed approximately 1,400 attack drones, 1,500 guided aerial bombs, and 19 missiles of various types, including ballistic missiles, against Ukraine over the past week.

In a statement published on Telegram, Zelensky noted that 15 Ukrainian regions were subjected to Russian attacks during the seven-day period. He highlighted that the cities of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, and Sumy faced near-daily bombardment.

But it also over the past week has sent projectiles into Russia in the thousands. Ukraine's asymmetric warfare strategy against Russia's much-larger and better armed military machine has put Kiev in significantly better position - in terms of potential negotiating leverage - than the status of a year or so ago.

Russian forces still have the upper-hand on the front line in the east, but the pain clearly being inflicted on Russia's economy can't be ignored at this point. There are reports of fuel shortages across dozens of regions and especially in Crimea over the past several days.

Multiple Ukrainian FP-5 “Flamingo” Cruise Missiles slam into the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology’s “Titan-Barrikady” Defense Plant, which designs and produces parts for artillery and ballistic missile launchers, in the Southern Russian city of Volgograd. pic.twitter.com/pwTrnuHVL4

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) June 27, 2026

President Trump has lately suggested that Ukraine is doing well in the war, or at least much better than it once was. Kiev now feels the pressure to keep this narrative going, also so it can attract more and more weapons and intelligence help. But at some point Russia will feel it necessary to strongly reassert its red lines. This could come in the form of another massive escalation, and against 'decision-making centers'.

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 14:35

Supreme Court's Alito Offers Unusual Response To Sotomayor's Dissent In Immigration Case

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

At a recent Supreme Court sitting, Justice Samuel Alito took the unusual step of responding from the bench to Justice Sonia Sotomayor's spoken dissent from an immigration-related opinion he wrote.

This combination photo shows Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Sept 16, 2024, in New York, left, and Justice Samuel Alito in Rome, Sept. 20, 2025. AP Photo

The June 25 incident took place in the final days of the current court's session, as the justices try to issue opinions in remaining cases before the court's summer recess, which typically begins before the Fourth of July.

Alito read aloud a summary of the majority opinion in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado. The 6-3 decision ruled that the government can turn away asylum-seekers at the border, clarifying a law that requires individuals to be inspected when they arrive in the United States.

Sotomayor followed, reading a summary of her dissenting opinion aloud.

Sotomayor said many asylum seekers face a challenging journey and recounted that after the United States and other countries turned back a ship full of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany in 1939, about 250 of those passengers died later in the Holocaust.

Sotomayor said the majority's opinion here would allow the Trump administration to prevent people from applying for asylum at the border, and that this would lead to more deaths. The decision "regrettably and tragically extinguishes the light of the torch of the Statue of Liberty," she said.

In her written dissent, Sotomayor stated, "more people will be forced to walk along the U.S.-Mexico border in dangerous conditions, trying to find a port that will inspect them."

Sotomayor's spoken dissent seemed to come as a surprise for Alito, who responded extemporaneously to it. He appeared frustrated, saying he would have said more during the court sitting and provided more details if he had known she planned to speak.

For the court's majority, Alito said, the case was about whether border officials can delay asylum seekers' entry into the United States "until they can be processed in a safe and orderly way."

The justice said that the policy at the center of the case had been used under both the Obama and Trump administrations. "I won't add anything more to that," he said.

A group of 13 asylum-seekers, led by immigrants' rights group Al Otro Lado, or To the Other Side, had filed suit in 2017 against the government's "metering" policy. That policy let border agents - usually at U.S. ports of entry - turn away asylum-seekers to avoid overcrowding of border facilities.

A federal law says that "any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States ... may apply for asylum," regardless of legal status.

In the majority opinion, Alito wrote: "This case presents a straightforward question: whether an alien who seeks to enter the United States from Mexico 'arrives in the United States' when he or she is still in Mexico.

"In the decision below, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit answered 'yes.' That is wrong."

Tensions in Public View

This was not the first time tensions between Supreme Court justices have been on public display.

In March, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson publicly clashed over the court's various emergency orders that have allowed President Donald Trump to pursue his policy agenda.

Lower courts have stifled Trump's policies by issuing orders blocking some of them. The Supreme Court has often provided emergency relief by lifting those orders.

Jackson said the Supreme Court is "creating a kind of warped" legal process by intervening at an early stage of a case and basically predicting the outcome before the arguments are developed fully.

"The administration is making new policy ... and then insisting the new policy take effect immediately, before the challenge is decided," Jackson said. "This uptick in the court's willingness to get involved in cases on the emergency docket is a real unfortunate problem."

Kavanaugh said the Supreme Court is only doing its job by addressing the emergency applications filed.

The Department of Justice's rush to the Supreme Court didn't begin during the Trump administration, the justice said. He said that as it becomes more difficult to enact legislation through Congress, administrations "push the envelope in regulations."

"Some are lawful, some are not," he said.

Sotomayor also made a rare public apology in April to Kavanaugh for making what she called "hurtful comments."

She had previously said during a speech at a law school that a colleague "probably doesn't really know any person who works by the hour."

Culture of Collegiality

Supreme Court justices have publicly stated that members of the nation's highest court are friendly and civil in their dealings with each other and have eschewed partisanship.

Chief Justice John Roberts said in May 2023 that "there has never been a voice raised in anger in our conference room," referring to the chamber in which justices discuss and vote on pending cases.

"Our court consists of nine appointees by four presidents. We deal with some of the most controversial issues in the country, yet we maintain collegial relations with each other," he said.

Sotomayor and Justice Amy Coney Barrett attempted to distance themselves from political parties and particular presidents in February of this year, with Sotomayor calling parties "the worst thing" to happen to the judiciary.

"They began to adopt our buzzwords as buzzwords - some of the discussions we were having like on originalism and plain text and things like that," Sotomayor said. "But instead of discussing those terms with respect to approaches that made sense and why - with all the nuances that those approaches contain - they just began to label people according to the buzzwords."

Barrett said, "We're not Obama judges and Trump judges, but we're also not Democratic judges or Republican judges."

"We don't sit on opposite sides of the aisle," she said. "We all wear the same color of black robe ... our loyalty lies all to the Constitution and to the court."

Barrett said even though the court is often described as "deeply divided," the vast majority of cases lead to unanimous or close-to-unanimous decisions.

Barrett likened the court to a "family" in which the justices offer small acts of kindness to promote a culture of collegiality.

She said it is a Supreme Court tradition for the second most junior justice to throw a party for the new justice who is entering. Kavanaugh, she said, threw a party for her, while she threw one for Jackson.

Sam Dorman, Stacy Robinson, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 14:00

Trump Shares New US Passport Design On Truth Social

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump on Friday shared on social media a rendering of what he said was the new U.S. passport design, underscoring a message of welcome paired with a call for good behavior while visiting.

The new U.S. passport design shared by President Donald Trump on his Truth Social on June 26, 2026. @realDonaldTrump via Truth Social

"The U.S.A.'s New Passport, which says, 'Welcome, but be good!'" Trump wrote in a Truth Social post, which included a visual of the passport.

The post lands as the State Department progresses with plans for a limited number of passports to mark the nation's 250th anniversary of independence. The documents are scheduled to be released in July.

State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said in a statement that the department would release "a limited number of specially designed U.S. passports to commemorate this historic occasion."

"These passports will feature customized artwork and enhanced imagery while maintaining the same security features that make the U.S. passport the most secure documents in the world," Pigott said.

A mockup previously shared by the White House displays the interior page featuring an image of Trump and his signature in gold. The back cover shows the "Declaration of Independence" painting by John Trumbull.

"Patriot passport unlocked. Limited edition. Stamped for America 250," the White House said in its post announcing the concept.

Trump's Friday post presents a rendering in line with the commemorative design being prepared. The limited-edition passports will feature all existing security features of standard U.S. passports.

The effort forms part of wider commemorations for the nation's 250th anniversary. Last year, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the department would issue new commemorative park passes this year to mark the nation's 250th anniversary. The annual passes feature images of George Washington and Trump. Military passes show a photo of Trump saluting troops.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts authorized a final design for a commemorative coin featuring Trump's image to mark the nation's anniversary.

"As we approach our 250th birthday, we are thrilled to prepare coins that represent the enduring spirit of our country and democracy, and there is no profile more emblematic for the front of such coins than that of our serving President, Donald J. Trump," Treasurer Brandon Beach said in a statement on March 20.

The Treasury Department also revealed on March 26 that Trump's signature would appear alongside that of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on future U.S. paper currency in honor of the 250th anniversary.

"There is no more powerful way to recognize the historic achievements of our great country and President Donald J. Trump than U.S dollar bills bearing his name, and it is only appropriate that this historic currency be issued at the Semiquincentennial," Bessent said.

Current U.S. passports include a double-page depiction of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota showing George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.

Other images include the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and Independence Hall in Philadelphia, as well as scenes of the Great Plains, mountains, and islands. Quotations from Martin Luther King Jr. and several past presidents also appear.

Trump's post comes days ahead of the July 4 anniversary date and celebrations across the country.

The State Department has not specified the exact number of limited-edition passports that will be produced or the precise distribution process beyond the July timeframe.

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 12:50

Trump Admin Allows Release Of Anthropic's Mythos To Certain US Companies

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

American artificial intelligence company Anthropic said on June 26 that the government has authorized it to release Claude Mythos 5, its most advanced AI model, to certain U.S. organizations, reversing a previous order that suspended access over security concerns.

Anthropic logo is seen in an illustration photo. Dado Ruvic/Reuters

The Trump administration on June 12 issued an export control directive to suspend access to Mythos 5 and Fable 5 - which shares the same underlying model as Mythos 5 but was designed for general use.

Anthropic said at the time that the government believed it had identified a method of jailbreaking Fable 5. Jailbreaking is the process of exploiting vulnerabilities to circumvent a software's built-in safety guardrails.

In the latest development, Anthropic said the government had informed it that Mythos 5 could be redeployed to "a small group of cyber defenders and infrastructure providers."

"We are working to provision the approved set of providers and restore their access to Mythos 5 as quickly as possible," an Anthropic spokesperson said in an emailed statement to The Epoch Times.

"We are pleased to see this progress and continue to work with the government to expand access to Mythos 5 and make Fable 5 available for general use again."

The U.S. Department of Commerce did not extend that approval to Fable 5.

The department informed Anthropic of the change in a letter dated June 26, which was obtained by The Epoch Times.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in the letter that he has concluded that "appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 model."

"Since the issuance of my June 12 letter, Anthropic has worked with the U.S. government to address risks associated with the covered models. These efforts have yielded significant progress," he wrote.

Lutnick said that Anthropic has committed to working with the government to develop protocols and standards for the AI models. He did not specify how many companies would be granted access to Mythos 5 or the criteria for selecting them.

Meanwhile, OpenAI also announced on June 26 the preview release of its new model, GPT-5.6, which will be limited to a small group of users approved by the Trump administration.

The Pentagon designated Anthropic as a supply-chain risk in March after the company refused to change the user policy for its Claude model to grant the government unrestricted access, citing concerns that the technology could be used for mass surveillance or for fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon said in February that it had no intention to use AI for such purposes and that it only asked Anthropic to allow it to use Claude models for "all lawful purposes."

The designation, imposed under a federal law designed to protect military systems from foreign sabotage, prevents the company from doing business with the federal government and its contractors.

Kimberly Hayek contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 11:40

Hezbollah Supporters Block Roads, Encircle Govt Buildings In Beirut Over Israel Deal: 'They Sold Us Out'

Mass protests broke out in Beirut on Friday into Saturday, with supporters of Hezbollah voicing their outrage at the Lebanese government having just signed a 'trilateral peace framework' with Israel and the United States, despite the IDF occupation of southern territory and sporadic Israeli bombings persisting. 

Hundreds of motorcycle-riding supporters were also seen circling streets through central Beirut, near the parliament building and along airport road. In some cases protesters blocked roads near sensitive government buildings, and were seen burning tires. The national army has set up checkpoints, seeking to return order, but in some cases didn't immediately move to disperse the protests.

via AFP

"We certainly condemn and denounce this shameful agreement," a 30-year old protesters from Blida, a town in southern Lebanon that Israel has occupied for months, told the NY Times. According to more:

One criticism of the preliminary deal is that the timeline for Israel’s withdrawal is not fixed, instead being based on how quickly Hezbollah can be disarmed. "The enemy is being granted freedom of movement and the ability to make whatever decisions it wants in the south," Mr. Kassem said.

Washington has long been seeking to push Hezbollah's influence out of national politics, and to ultimately see the Iran-backed group disarmed and its power neutered.

The protester's have in turn exclaimed: 

"They sold us out!"

The Trump administration and Israel have been hailing it as 'historic' - also as the US is seeking to ensure the conflict in Lebanon won't derail the broader peace deal with Iran, toward getting the Strait of Hormuz open again.

Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem has meanwhile in new denunciatory words on Saturday charged that Lebanon's government has given legitimacy to Israel's "occupation for many years to come" by signing the deal.

"This could even lead to the annexation of these lands to the Zionist entity," Qassem said. "We say to the Lebanese authorities: It is time for you to retract your sins that are destroying Lebanon."

The Hezbollah Secretary-General vowed to remain "ready to cooperate and stand together for the sovereignty of Lebanon, the liberation of its land, the expulsion of the Israeli occupier."

He also said that the US deal links Israel's withdrawal to Hezbollah's disarmament throughout Lebanon, which "is an extremely dangerous proposition that crosses all red lines and makes Lebanon a pawn in the hands of the Israeli enemy."

Beirut right now!
People and motorcycle groups have occupied the roads in Beirut in protest of the Lebanese authorities signing and agreement with Israeli enemy that "legalized " their occupation of South Lebanon and gave legal immunity to Netanyahu regarding his warcrimes. pic.twitter.com/acHBV3dFrb

— Hadi Hoteit | هادي حطيط (@HadiHtt) June 26, 2026

"The authorities are legitimizing the occupation for many years to come, and this could even lead to the annexation of these lands to the Zionist entity. Any agreement must be confined to the area south of the Litani River," he added, stressing the Shia paramilitary group's resistance to these developments will be steadfast.

Hezbollah had all along refused to be at the table for the Washington-hosted talks, and it accused Israel of a war of aggression on Lebanese territory, with an aim to expand Israel's borders.

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 11:05

Friedman Was Right, Just Mostly Misquoted...

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Milton Friedman’s famous one-liner that anchors half the inflation debates on financial television leaves out the part where the actual economics live. Once you put it back in, the doomist case gets a lot smaller.

Per Bylund recently wrote a sharp piece for The Daily Economy arguing that CPI and GDP have become Goodhart’s Law in action. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure. He has a point, and we’ll come back to it. But the bigger problem with the inflation conversation isn’t really about CPI. It’s about the way the famous Milton Friedman inflation quote gets weaponized by people who almost certainly haven’t read past the comma.

The line you always hear is, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” Full stop. Print money, get inflation, or corporations cause inflation. Then, the doomers grab a chart of M2 and a warning about hyperinflation.

That’s not what Friedman actually said.

What Friedman Actually Said

The complete sentence is,

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”

That trailing clause changes everything.

The monetary doomists drop it because it complicates the bumper sticker. But “than in output” is where the real economics is.

Friedman was reasoning from the equation of exchange, MV = PQ. Money times velocity equals prices times real output. It’s an identity, not a theory. Where it gets interesting is when you ask which variable does the work. Friedman’s claim was that, over the long run, sustained changes in the general price level can come only from money growing faster than the economy’s productive capacity. Supply was already inside his framework. A collapse in output with steady money produces the same price effect as money growth with steady output.

So the “supply and demand drives inflation” intuition isn’t competing with Friedman. It’s living inside his model. The question is whether the imbalance persists, which depends on whether monetary policy accommodates it.

The Distinction Everyone Misses

Friedman drew a hard line between relative price changes and sustained inflation. That distinction is what gets lost in the modern debate.

When oil prices spike due to a war, consumers spend more on energy and necessarily less on everything else. Relative prices shift. Energy goes up, discretionary goods come under pressure. The general price level doesn’t have to rise unless monetary policy expands the money available to spend on everything. Without that accommodation, you get a one-time level shift in the price index, and then prices stabilize. That’s not inflation in Friedman’s sense. That’s a relative price adjustment.

This is why Friedman could call inflation “a monetary phenomenon” without being naive about supply shocks. He simply argued that supply shocks alone don’t produce sustained inflation. They produce volatility around a level. The trend in the level comes from the money side.

Here’s the problem with how this gets used today. Both the inflation alarmists and the cable news pundits flatten the distinction. The doomists see any money growth and forecast persistent inflation, ignoring that velocity might collapse and absorb the expansion. The pundits see any price spike and call it inflation, ignoring that without monetary accommodation, it’s likely to fade.

The 1970s are the clearest historical illustration of why both supply and money must be present for sustained inflation. Most people remember the decade as an “oil shock” story, but that’s only half right. CPI was already running hot before the 1973 Arab oil embargo and again before the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Money supply growth had been excessive for years, and interest rates had been held too low. The oil shocks didn’t create inflation out of nothing. They pushed an already-loosened cork out of an already-pressurized bottle. Lacy Hunt has been making essentially this argument about the current setup, and he’s right to flag the parallel. A supply shock landing on top of loose money is the configuration that produces a sustained inflation problem. A supply shock landing on a disciplined monetary base produces a level shift that fades.

Money Has to Grow for the Economy to Grow

Here’s where the doomist case really starts to fall apart. The accusation is that “money printing causes inflation.” But in a modern fiat system, every dollar of money in circulation is debt. Either it’s a commercial bank loan that created a deposit on the other side of the ledger, or it’s government borrowing financed through the banking system. There is no third option.

The Bank of England’s 2014 paper, Money Creation in the Modern Economy, laid this out explicitly. Banks don’t lend out reserves. They create deposits when they make loans, and the reserves are created in parallel. So the entire monetary base is, in a real sense, debt that has to be serviced with growing nominal income.

That has a structural implication that most armchair monetarists miss. If money doesn’t grow, the economy can’t grow either. Real debts (fixed in nominal terms) become heavier as nominal income stagnates. Defaults cascade. Credit contracts. You get 1933, which is exactly what Irving Fisher described in his debt-deflation theory. The system is built to require expansion.

So when someone screams about M2 going up, the relevant question isn’t whether M2 went up. M2 has to go up. The relevant question is whether it went up faster than the economy’s productive capacity could absorb it. That’s the real Friedman test, and it’s a much higher bar than the doomists set.

“In a debt-based system, the question isn’t whether money grew. Money has to grow. The question is whether it grew faster than what the economy can produce.”

Velocity Is the Missing Variable

The other piece almost nobody talks about is velocity. MV = PQ has four variables, not three. And V, the rate at which money circulates through the economy, is wildly unstable. Ignore it, and you get inflation forecasts that look ridiculous in hindsight.

Consider the cleanest natural experiment we’ve ever had. From 2008 to 2020, the Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet by trillions through three rounds of quantitative easing. The doomists screamed about hyperinflation for the entire decade. It never came. Why? Because velocity collapsed. Banks parked the new reserves rather than lending them. Consumers deleveraged rather than spent. The money sat still. M went up, but V went down by roughly the same amount, and PQ barely moved.

Then 2020 happened. The Fed expanded the balance sheet again, but this time the government also sent stimulus checks directly into consumer bank accounts. Supply chains broke. Workers stayed home. And velocity, instead of falling, recovered. You had money growing fast, money circulating again, and productive capacity disrupted, all at once. Inflation hit 9.1% by June 2022.

That’s the cleanest example we’ll ever get of why the simple “M2 up means inflation up” framework is incomplete. Inflation emerged when M, V, and the supply constraint on Q all moved in the same direction simultaneously. The doomists were wrong from 2009 to 2020 because they ignored V. The “transitory” crowd was wrong in 2021 because they underestimated how all three would compound.

And now here we are in 2026, with a setup that’s worth watching closely. The Fed restarted bill purchases earlier this year, calling it a technical operation to ease strain in the repo market. Whatever the label, bank lending has surged. Loans and leases are growing at a 10% annualized pace. Commercial and industrial lending is running closer to 20%. Money supply is accelerating again. This is no longer a 2009-to-2020 regime where money sits idle on bank balance sheets.

The money is being put to work, the velocity question is firmly on the table, and the Treasury’s pivot to short-term bill issuance is forcing the Fed to operate at the short end of the curve whether it wants to or not. That’s the setup Friedman would have flagged. Money plus velocity plus a fiscal-monetary configuration that looks an awful lot like accommodation.

The Composition of Credit Matters More Than the Quantity

Beyond velocity, there’s a second piece that the bumper-sticker monetarism completely misses. Where the credit flows matters as much as how much credit gets created.

A dollar lent to build a factory expands future productive capacity, but a dollar lent to fund a stock buyback inflates current asset prices without expanding the economy’s productive capacity. A dollar lent to a consumer for a vacation expands current consumption without leaving any productive residue. Same dollar, same “money creation,” very different downstream effect.

The Austrians, including the school from which Bylund writes, have a real point here that monetarists routinely flatten. When credit funds are invested in malinvestment rather than productive capital, you can have apparent “growth” that’s really just hollowing out the productive base while inflating asset prices. Most of the post-2008 era worked exactly like this. Credit aggregates exploded, but the flow disproportionately went into financial assets, real estate, and corporate balance-sheet engineering. Consumer prices didn’t move much. Asset prices went vertical. That’s not inflation in the CPI sense. But it’s also not “growth” in any meaningful sense either.

The current AI capex boom is the live test of this framework. The bank lending surging through the financial system right now appears to be funding data centers, chip fabs, power infrastructure, and the related buildout. That’s productive credit by definition, as it expands future capacity to produce. If that’s what’s happening, the inflation impact of the recent money growth should be more muted than the simple M2 chart suggests, because Q is being expanded alongside M.

If, on the other hand, a large share of this credit is funding speculative valuations rather than real capacity, you get the Austrian outcome. Asset prices go vertical, productive capacity doesn’t expand to match, and the inflation eventually shows up either in consumer prices or in a brutal asset-side reversal. We won’t know which scenario we’re in for another year or two. But the framework tells you exactly what to watch. Track where the credit is landing, not just how much of it is being created.

How Different Schools Define Inflation

The reason these debates feel like everyone is talking past each other is that the underlying definition of inflation differs across schools. The table below lines up where each tradition starts and what it treats as the cause.

That last row brings us back to Bylund. His argument is that CPI and GDP have ceased to be useful measures because they’ve become policy targets. Goodhart’s Law in action. He’s not wrong about that. Price controls don’t fight inflation. They suppress the symptom (measured CPI) while worsening the disease, which is real shortages and capital misallocation. The 1971 Nixon wage-price controls are the textbook case. Government spending that produces no productive output really does inflate GDP without inflating wealth. The Soviet Union had impressive GDP growth on paper for decades before it collapsed because the “output” wasn’t producing things anyone valued.

So far, so good. But here’s where the critique runs into a wall. Bylund attacks the measures without proposing how policymakers, central banks, investors, or ordinary readers should actually operate without them. “Just understand the underlying concept better” isn’t operational. The Fed has to make decisions, allocators have to deploy capital, and investors have to make portfolio choices. You can’t run a $27 trillion economy on Austrian methodological purity.

Yes, CPI is flawed. Every serious economist knows it, but the answer isn’t to abandon measurement. It’s about using multiple measures rigorously, understanding their limitations, and triangulating. PCE, trimmed-mean CPI, sticky-price CPI, the Cleveland Fed’s median CPI, and M2 velocity-adjusted measures of money. These exist precisely because thoughtful people know any single number is insufficient. The “experts” Bylund attacks for treating CPI as ground truth are largely a strawman of cable news pundits and political talking points, not the actual analytical community.

What This Means for Investors

The bottom line is that both ends of the inflation debate are wrong in mirror-image ways. The doomists who quote Friedman as “money printer go brrr” stripped away the second half of his sentence, ignored velocity, and missed a decade of disinflation that should have updated their model. The CPI-is-everything crowd ignored the monetary side and got blindsided in 2021 by an inflation surge they kept calling transitory.

The synthesis that actually survives contact with the data is this. Sustained inflation requires money and velocity growing faster than productive capacity. In a debt-based system, money has to grow, so monetary expansion alone isn’t a signal of anything. The real signal is when the growth of money times velocity decouples from the growth of real output. That’s the Friedman test as he actually wrote it, and it’s still the right test.

For portfolios, this means that you should NOT:

• React to M2 data in isolation; look at M2 times velocity together.
• React to single CPI prints, look at the trimmed mean, and the sticky components.
• Assume government spending creates growth just because it shows up in GDP, ask whether it actually expanded productive capacity or just shuffled financial claims.
• Treat the measures as imperfect signals, not as ground truth, but don’t pretend you can invest without them.

There’s one more thing worth flagging for 2026. The Treasury is now funding a deepening deficit by tilting heavily toward short-term bill issuance, with the share of bills in total outstanding debt exceeding the 20% ceiling the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee recommends. When the borrower of last resort floods the short end of the curve, the central bank is pulled into providing liquidity there, whether it wants to or not.

That’s the textbook definition of fiscal dominance, and it’s the configuration that turns a discretionary central bank into an accommodator. Combine that with the bank lending surge and the AI-driven credit boom, and the relevant question for investors isn’t whether the Fed will tighten policy. The relevant question is whether the fiscal setup will leave the Fed any room to tighten in the first place.

That’s how you take Bylund’s Goodhart critique seriously without throwing out the analytical toolkit. And it’s how you read Friedman without becoming a caricature of him.

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 10:30

Federal Court Clears Way For Gulf Of America Energy Development

Authored by Kimberley Hayek via The Epoch Times,

A federal court has quashed a lawsuit objecting to federal supervision of oil and gas operations in the Gulf of America following the government’s steps of exempting those activities from the Endangered Species Act (ESA), citing national security reasons. 

The U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland decreed the case moot and said it did not hold jurisdiction to continue. The dismissal comes after the Endangered Species Committee’s unanimous March 31 move to exempt all Gulf of America oil and gas operations from the ESA. 

The committee made the decision after the secretary of war concluded an exemption was required for national security reasons, marking the first time the committee has issued an exemption based on national security reasons.

The exemption rescinded the legal foundation for the National Marine Fisheries Service’s 2025 biological opinion and incidental take statement regarding those activities. 

Without underlying ESA requirements to enforce, the documents “retain no legal force,” the Justice Department said Thursday when announcing the court decision. 

“The Endangered Species Committee’s exemption reflects a judgment at the highest levels of government that producing American energy in the Gulf of America is essential to our national security,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division said in a statement.

“Today’s decision clears away litigation that threatened development in the Gulf, in furtherance of President Donald J. Trump’s directive to unleash American energy.”

The Endangered Species Committee is composed of six senior federal officials and is chaired by the secretary of the interior. 

Congress empowered the panel to exempt agency actions from Section 7 of the ESA and directed it to grant an exemption whenever the secretary of war finds national security requires it. The exemption now governs the Gulf oil and gas program. ESA rules cannot be deployed to disrupt energy production that the government views as key to the nation, the department said.

Attorneys with the Environment and Natural Resources Division’s Wildlife and Marine Resources Section handled the matter for the government.

The decision marks a significant change in how ESA applies to major energy projects in the Gulf. 

Section 7 generally requires federal agencies to consult with the National Marine Fisheries Service prior to taking actions that could affect endangered or threatened species or their critical habitat. 

The service examines potential impacts and, if appropriate, issues a biological opinion and an incidental take statement to allow limited harm to protected species if steps are taken to minimize effects.

The dismissed lawsuit challenged the 2025 biological opinion and incidental take statement for Gulf oil and gas operations. The exemption nullified those documents as irrelevant to the projects, putting an end to the legal dispute over their validity or sufficiency.

By dismissing the case, the court did not have to issue a ruling on the substance of the environmental claims. 

The result precludes one potential legal case that could have delayed or impacted energy development in the region.

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 09:20

Feds Nab Iranian In Montenegro Over Alleged $3.4BN Cyberattack Campaign Targeting US Institutions

In the years leading up to President Trump coming into office and ordering Operation Epic Fury targeting the Islamic Republic for regime change, which failed to accomplish this (early-stated) goal, Iran had frequently been accused of orchestrating major cyberespionage campaigns targeting the United States and its allies.

But rarely was any individual or group apprehended for such alleged cyberattacks, much less was definitive proof uncovered of backing from the Iranian government. But on Friday there has been a reported capture of an Iranian suspected cyber-attacker, said to be behind dozens of significant sabotage attacks on American institutions, mainly of higher learning.

A high-profile international manhunt ended in the coastal town of Kotor on Thursday, as Montenegrin police, reportedly acting on an FBI tip-off, arrested an Iranian-Turkish dual national accused of masterminding a catastrophic, decade-long cyberwar against US infrastructure.

via Reuters

The 39-year-old suspect, identified by authorities only as "A.B.", is wanted by the United States for allegedly orchestrating cyberattacks that inflicted a staggering $3.4 billion in damages.

The suspect is facing a laundry list of charges from a New York court - among them computer fraud, hacking, identity theft, organized crime.

Authorities allege that from 2013 onwards he carried out "massive hacking attacks" systematically targeting American intellectual property. Astoundingly this included more than 150 US universities, which saw their networks infiltrated and proprietary data plundered.

The actions apparently weren't just for profit, as investigators allege the stolen data and compromised university accounts were weaponized "for the benefit of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian beneficiaries, including universities."

However, it's as yet unclear what evidence exists for this, or the degree to which authorities have found ties to state entities or intelligence - but one can imagine that operations of this scale might likely have had state backing.

The suspect is currently being held ahead of an appearance before a court in the Montenegrin capital, Podgorica, which will ultimately rule on the US extradition request - something which will likely be granted, given the FBI assist to local investigators.

Back in 2018, the Department of Justice unsealed a sweeping indictment that accused nine Iranian nationals of hacking universities and other organizations to steal academic research and data.

🇲🇪🇮🇷🇺🇸 An accused IRGC hacker who targeted 150+ American universities just got arrested, at a beach resort in Montenegro.

The numbers are staggering: $3.4 billion in damage. Stolen credentials allegedly funneled straight to Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

Montenegro police picked… pic.twitter.com/koflMD3q5Q

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) June 26, 2026

So far, US authorities have not specifically indicated whether the latest arrest is connected to that prior case, leaving open the question of whether "A.B." was a lone operator or part of a much larger state-backed or intelligence-linked apparatus.

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 08:45

EU Joins US-Led Pax Silica Alliance To Secure AI Supply Chains

Authored by James Xu via The Epoch Times,

The European Commission, Germany, Greece, and the Netherlands have joined the U.S.-led Pax Silica partnership, expanding a group focused on securing supply chains for artificial intelligence and other critical technologies.

Semiconductor chips on a circuit board of a computer on Feb. 25, 2022. Florence Lo/Illustration/Reuters

The announcement came at a summit in Washington on June 23 hosted by the U.S. State Department. The partnership aims to strengthen cooperation on semiconductors, critical minerals, energy, and advanced manufacturing.

U.S. Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg welcomed the new members.

"The European Union does not join Pax Silica as one more name on a list. It arrives as what it is: the largest single market on Earth," he said.

Helberg highlighted Germany's industrial base, Greece's shipping industry and strategic location, and the Netherlands' longstanding role in semiconductor equipment, where it has long been a key partner.

According to the U.S. State Department, members signed a declaration committing to "mutual prosperity, technological progress, and economic security." The agreement also calls for reducing excessive supply chain dependencies and building trusted technology ecosystems with private industry.

The European Union joined after EU member states authorized the European Commission to sign on behalf of the bloc.

Trusted Supply Chains

Pax Silica was launched in Washington in December 2025. Founding members included Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Israel, among others. They signed the initial declaration to strengthen cooperation on technologies considered critical to future economic security.

The partnership has grown steadily since then. Members now also include Australia, India, the Philippines, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. Taiwan has endorsed the initiative's principles through a separate joint statement but is not a formal signatory.

U.S. officials say the partnership is intended to build trusted supply chains among allies. The move forms part of broader U.S. efforts to reduce dependence on China for technologies such as advanced chips, critical minerals, and AI infrastructure.

China currently dominates global rare earth processing, accounting for roughly 80 to 90 percent of refined supply. It also holds a significant share of mining output for several key critical minerals used in electronics and renewable energy technologies.

In April, the United States and the Philippines announced plans for a 4,000-acre economic security zone in the Luzon Economic Corridor to support production for strategic supply chains under the partnership.

This zone is described by officials as the first AI-native industrial acceleration hub under Pax Silica.

Helberg said similar cooperation on critical minerals is under discussion with Kazakhstan, though no agreement has been announced. Such projects mark the initiative's move into practical application.

Further announcements on new members and projects are expected in the coming weeks.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 08:10

Zelensky Telegraphs 40-Day Pressure Offensive On Russia, Fueling Fears Of Slide Toward WW3

The Ukraine war is quite obviously escalating, especially regarding Ukrainian leaders seeking to "bring the war" to Russian soil, amid nightly drone attacks which have come in the hundreds and even thousands of late.

President Volodymyr Zelensky is seeking to seize on the momentum of repeat drone hits on Russian refinery and energy infrastructure - a reality Russia has suffered over many months, leading to a current fuel crisis spanning dozens of cities and regions, and especially Crimea, which has temporarily halted fuel sales to common citizens altogether this week.

Ukrainian media is touting a new Zelensky plan to ramp up the pressure on Russia over the next 40 days, aimed at "pressuring Russia to end its war".

Ukrainian Presidential Office

He has ordered Ukraine's State Security Service (SBU) to launch a new 40-day operation, which also includes "plan for long-range sanctions, medium-range sanctions, and the results achieved by the SBU," Zelensky said on X. He's further calling it an "influence operation."

"For several months in a row, the SBU has demonstrated the highest performance in defending Ukraine’s positions on the front lines through the use of various types of drones," Zelensky said on Thursday evening. According to more of the statement:

I approved a 40-day influence operation for the Service against the aggressor state aimed at compelling it to end the war.

Importantly, for several months in a row, the SSU has demonstrated the highest performance in defending Ukraine’s positions on the front lines through the use of various types of drones. The Center of Special Operations “Alpha” leads in terms of the occupier’s personnel and equipment neutralized.

Earlier, in mid-June, Ukrainian Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov proclaimed  "Hell is beginning," for Russia and its military. "Logistics are being cut off. Crimea is being isolated," he said at the time.

Ukraine's asymmetric warfare against Russia's much-larger and better armed military machine is in a significantly better position than the status of a year or so ago. Russian forces still have the upper-hand on the front line in the east, but the pain clearly being inflicted on Russia's economy can't be ignored at this point.

This sets up a potential slide into tit-for-tat escalation which could unleash a WW3 scenario. In the meantime this is an interesting-timed warning from Latvia and Poland:

Western intelligence agencies are increasingly concerned that Russia may be preparing a limited hybrid operation targeting NATO's eastern flank, potentially involving the Baltic states or Poland.

Such a move, officials believe, could be an attempt to test the alliance's unity as the war in Ukraine enters a new phase.

According to reporting by The Guardian, intelligence officials from two NATO countries have warned that Moscow is considering a "provocation" rather than a full-scale military attack.

Report by Major General Yevhenii Khmara on our long-range sanctions plan, mid-range sanctions, and the results of the Security Service of Ukraine – specifically the Center of Special Operations “Alpha” – on the front.

I approved a 40-day influence operation for the Service… pic.twitter.com/Ue6O21i6xH

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) June 25, 2026

At the moment inside Russia, many regions of Russia seem powerless to stop Ukraine's inbound drone waves, given also that conventional air defenses are set up to defend primarily against larger, faster-moving projectiles like missiles or jets.

President Trump has lately suggested that Ukraine is doing well in the war, or at least much better than it once was. Kiev now feels the pressure to keep this narrative going, also so it can attract more and more weapons and intelligence help. But at some point Russia will feel it necessary to strongly reassert its red lines. This could come in the form of another massive escalation, and against 'decision-making centers'.

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 07:35

When Extremists Run The Government

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Two can certainly play the “extremist” game...

Politicians, government bureaucrats, central bankers, spy agencies, and mainstream news outlets lie to us every day.  

For some people, the previous sentence is patently obvious.  For others, that sentence represents “fringe” thinking.  For certain law enforcement agencies in North America and Europe, that sentence reveals potentially dangerous “extremism.”

“Extremism” is such a morally squishy word.  It means nothing.  It suggests that the average beliefs of the average person in the average part of an average town are, on average, correct.  Should a person’s beliefs move too far away from the “average,” then that person will eventually fall into the “extremist” abyss.  Of course, the average person long believed that the sun and planets revolved around the Earth.  The average person long believed that bloodletting cured disease. The average person long believed in magic.  Relativity, microbiology, atomic physics, and quantum mechanics belonged to the “extremists.”

Defining “extremism” depends upon which populations are included when calculating an “average.”  To the average American, Islamic terrorism is religious extremism.  To the average jihadi in the Middle East, terrorism is part of the Islamic faith.  One man’s “extremist” is another man’s “religious cleric.”  Unsurprisingly, as more jihadists migrate to America, the more supportive of Islamic terrorism the Democrat Party becomes.  We now have several Hamas-supporting members of Congresswho define Americans opposed to Islamic conquest as “extremists.”  For a decade, Americans were told to be on the lookout for Islamic terrorism: “If you see something, say something.”  Now, if you see something and say something, you will most likely be denounced as an “Islamophobic bigot.”  If the definition of “extremism” can shift 180 degrees since the Islamic terror attacks on September 11, 2001, then “extremism” is a nebulous political label.

In the United States, citizens overwhelmingly support federal legislation that would require photo ID, proof of citizenship, and other safeguards to ensure that elections across the country are free, fair, lawful, constitutional, and secure.  

Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans in Congress prefer to maintain the current “on your honor” system that can be gamed to permit large-scale vote fraud and rigged elections.  By any polling measure, Congress’s point of view is far from that of the average American.  Members of Congress, in other words, are the extremists!  If you listen to the extremists in Congress, however, our elections have never been more secure.

In fact, when you look at some of the most important policy issues today, it becomes quite clear that Congress is ground zero for extremism.  

Most Americans want Congress to stop spending more money than it receives in taxes; Congress has put us forty trillion dollars in debt.  Most Americans want secure borders and an end to illegal immigration; Congress has enabled an evil human trafficking system to exist for over fifty years that rewards criminals and has flooded the country with somewhere between fifty and a hundred million (nobody knows for sure!) illegal aliens.  Most Americans are concerned about lowering fuel and food prices; Congress has wasted trillions of dollars on “Green New Deal” scams that raise the household costs for fuel and food.  Most Americans believe that college admissions and job hiring should be based on a person’s merit, skill, character, knowledge, and hard work; Congress continues to divide Americans by the color of their skin and their sexual eccentricities.  Most Americans believe that men and women are biologically distinct; Congress pretends that biological sex is an imaginary social construct.  Most Americans believe that a dollar saved today should maintain the same value ten, fifty, or even a hundred years from now; Congress thinks printing and spending dollars, depreciating the U.S. currency, and artificially spiking the dollar-denominated valuation of stocks, homes, and other assets is the best way to fake a constantly “improving” economy.  Most Americans believe that we should refrain from military engagements overseas whenever possible; Congress can’t ever get enough of forever-wars.  Most Americans want their representatives to work for American citizens; Congress believes it should work on behalf of non-Americans all over the world.  Most Americans view their country as a nation; Congress views the United States as both a global empire and a home for every person on the planet.

On the most important issues, Congress is filled to the brim with extremists.  They should be put on official security lists and monitored whenever they travel more than fifty feet from their taxpayer-financed homes.  Instead, in the United States and throughout the West, the extremists run things.

That would explain why Christians are targeted for their beliefs.  That would explain why the governments of Europe and North America have flooded their countries with unassimilable malcontents from the third world.  That would explain why men are allowed into women’s restrooms and why pedophiles are accorded more respect than heterosexual married couples.  That would explain why Western governments have declared war on “climate change” when most people don’t care about elites’ obsession with the weather.  That would explain why so many European and North American politicians are willing to risk a nuclear war with the Russian Federation, while ordinary citizens have never been less willing to fight for the defense of their respective countries.

Perhaps the more that ordinary Westerners realize that it is the people running their governments, universities, and bureaucratic institutions who are most extreme, the less willing they become to do what those extremists say.  Six years ago, the extremists locked down the world because of COVID.  They closed churches, bankrupted businesses, disrupted childhood education, prevented family members from being together, and killed a lot of people with fake “vaccines.”  If public health extremists tried to pull another COVID today, would ordinary Westerners do what the politicians and bureaucrats say?  Or would Western citizens conclude that extremist governments endanger both their lives and liberties?

Two can certainly play the “extremist” game.  Two-hundred-fifty years ago, the British Empire believed the patriots of America’s thirteen colonies to be extremists.  The patriots disagreed.  They considered it extreme for members of Parliament to make decisions on their behalf while residing 3,500 miles away.  The two sets of “extremists” fought it out, and we American “extremists” now celebrate July 4 as Independence Day.

My question is this: How much longer can the governments of Europe and North America continue to ignore the wishes of their national populations before we find ourselves in a situation where there is an explosion of public declarations of independence from the political and bureaucratic extremists who have ruined people’s lives?  For, as much as Western governments appear to be betting on mass surveillance, central bank digital currencies, censorship, propaganda, and technocratic oppression as weapons of control to help maintain power well into the future, there’s nothing so unpredictable as a fed-up populace ready for a little revolution.  When enough people recognize themselves as average representatives of the public will and their government officials as extremists representing only their own interests, things get interesting.  Being labeled an “extremist” by government extremists means nothing.

One might even ask: Isn’t globalism tantamount to extremism when a politician puts other nations’ interests ahead of his own?  Surely, when a government official undermines the nation he serves by championing open borders policies or wasting taxpayer dollars on “climate change” boondoggles at the U.N., that official deserves to be labeled an “extremist.”  Globalists certainly don’t represent the average North American or European citizen.  But they do represent the average cosmopolitan bureaucrat who sees no country as home.

In a world of nations whose populations require different things, globalism is extremist.  

In a world of varying cultures and competing beliefs, forced multiculturalism is extremist.  

In a world where some people wish to be free, international government is extremist.

Fighting for liberty is not extremist.  It is government tyranny that is extreme.

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 07:00

US Strikes Iran In Retaliation To Hormuz Ship Attack

Update (5:00pm ET): As was expected, the US retaliated against Iran one day after Tehran struck a commercial ship in the Strait of Hormuz, a tit-for-tat exchange similar to one observed a week ago, and one which threatened to break the two countries’ fragile ceasefire although we doubt there will be further escalation.

US Central Command said that American aircraft on Friday hit Iranian missile and drone storage sites as well as coastal radar installations, reportedly on Sirik Island located near the Strait of Hormuz, calling it a “powerful response to yesterday’s attack.”

U.S. aircraft struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations and coastal radar sites after Iran hit M/V Ever Lovely on June 25 with a one-way attack drone. The Singapore-flagged cargo ship was exiting the Strait of Hormuz along the Omani coast at the time of Iran’s attack.

The unwarranted aggression against commercial shipping by Iranian forces clearly violated the ceasefire. Furthermore, Iran’s dangerous behavior undermined freedom of navigation as commerce increasingly flows through the vital international trade corridor.  

CENTCOM forces continue to provide safe passage coordination and support to commercial vessels transiting the strait. The U.S. military remains present and vigilant to ensure all aspects of the agreement with Iran are adhered to, obeyed, and in full force and effect.

Fox reporter Jennifer Griffin said that according to senior US defense officials the strikes on Iranian targets are "ongoing" right now.

According to unconfirmed reported from military bloggers, there is currently intensified U.S. military air activity is now underway over the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf, with 6 U.S. Air Force aerial refueling tankers operating alongside a U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraf

On Thursday, the Singapore-flagged container ship Ever Lovely sustained damage from what the US said was a one-way Iranian attack drone. The incident irked President Donald Trump, who said earlier Friday that “I don’t like the fact that they took a shot.”

“They shouldn’t be doing that,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

Earlier on Friday, he wrote on Truth Social that the Iranian attack was "a foolish violation of our Ceasefire Agreement

Since signing a 60-day truce last week, Trump has said that he would resume fighting against Iran if Tehran violates its terms, which provides for the flow of vessels through the vital waterway and talks over its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

The question now is whether the resumption of strikes will slow progress toward restoring shipping traffic in the vital energy thoroughfare to pre-war levels. Washington and Tehran were able to agree to an interim peace deal last week despite trading strikes in the lead-up to that document being finalized.

But the two sides continue to clash over key provisions of the deal, including whether Iran will impose tolls or other monetary costs on ships seeking to sail through Hormuz. Oman told European officials that vessels may ultimately have to be charged some fees, Bloomberg reported earlier.

Now we wait to see if Iran responds militarily, although we doubt it as the entire operation has a smell of coordinated, jointly orchestrated activity to throw red meat at the respective bases, especially after Iran's revolutionary guards said US forces attacked Sirik Island, and Iran "successfully repelled the attack."

• *IRGC: IRAN IS RESPONDING TO US ATTACKS NEAR STRAIT: ISNA
• *IRGC SAYS IRAN 'SUCCESSFULLY REPELLED' US ATTACK: ISNA

Finally, Fox News tweeted that "military strikes targeting Iran are complete for tonight."

And with that, the show is over. 

* * * 

Update (11:55am ET): While today's announcement by Dubai that the UAE was under missile attack proved to be a false alarm, the US ceasefire it nonetheless becoming increasingly unstable. Following yesterday's attack by Iran drones on a cargo ship next to Oman, we were wondering how long until Trump responds (and how), and he did just that moments ago when he posted on Truth Social that Iran shoting "at least four One Way Attack Drones at Ships transversing the Strait of Hormuz" is "a foolish violation of our Ceasefire Agreement." 

However, Trump's post follows earlier reports that the US and Iran had set up a deconfliction hotline involving precisely such events in the Gulf, so we doubt that there will be much if any follow through from this latest round of jawboning, especially now that Trump is set on maintaining the flow of oil through Hormuz as much as possible, which has allowed oil to tumble to pre-war levels.

* * * 

With each week and month that passes since the start of Trump's Operation Epic Fury, more and more reports have come out revealing the massive extent of damage to US military facilities in the Mideast region based on Iran's retaliation across the region. 

This is often based on fresh satellite imaging and analysis, despite US government pressure for these research entities to refrain from publishing such data, and to censor open source photographs. After a series of deep investigative reports, it has been proven time and again that the Pentagon and Washington officials have been downplaying and covering up the real extent of devastation caused by Iranian missiles and drones.

More fresh reporting in the Wall Street Journal once again adds confirmation to this, referencing satellite imagery which shows far more serious damage at a key naval base in Bahrain than the US has publicly acknowledged.

WSJ featured newly publicized images of whole US military command & communications buildings belonging to the US Navy in Bahrain obliterated, via AIRBUS

The damage is said to be bad enough that the Pentagon is mulling shrinking its troop presence there and elsewhere in the Gulf, including a potential reduced troop footprint in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Iran is hailing this reported pullback as a significant strategic victory produced by its retaliation.

Unnamed officials were cited in the report as saying American forces could retreat as far westward as Israel, after some bases essentially became unusable or uninhabitable altogether.

Concerning the Bahrain base details, WSJ writes:

The U.S. Navy base in Bahrain was repeatedly targeted between late February and June. Strikes that got through caused extensive damage, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of satellite imagery, social-media footage and interviews with current and former servicemembers—damage that the Pentagon hasn’t publicly acknowledged. Hit hard were the command headquarters and at least a dozen other buildings, along with two satellite communications terminals. 

The military said no one was killed at the base, known as Naval Support Activity Bahrain, and that the strikes didn’t significantly impact operations. The U.S. evacuated most personnel but has kept a small staff on the ground. 

Notably in Bahrain the headquarters building for the US Navy in the Middle East was struck and seriously damaged, along with sensitive communications centers being destroyed.

But here is a key, somewhat unexpected line in the Journal report: "The extensive damage done to America’s sole naval base in the Middle East - along with hits to at least 20 U.S. sites across the region, including military installations and diplomatic facilities - has the U.S. re-evaluating its entire footprint in the region, according to U.S. officials familiar with the deliberations.

This means that damaged structures and bases may not be rebuilt at all, and the sites may just be abandoned as future key US military hubs, WSJ says.

The draw-down of expensive Pentagon comms centers could include from Bahrain: "The military is now considering revamping the base in Bahrain, reducing the U.S. presence in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and moving some bases or base functions west, farther from the reach of Iranian missiles and drones, according to the officials familiar with the deliberations," WSJ writes.

Reconstruction costs would be staggering, per the same report:

The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated in a report published Tuesday that the total cost of the war was about $40 billion. That estimate included their calculus of $2.2 billion to $5.1 billion in damage to U.S. bases, based on structures that CSIS identified as damaged. 

The Journal used satellite images and social-media footage to identify which buildings on the Bahrain base were damaged. To estimate what it would cost to construct buildings of the same types today, the Journal reviewed a publicly available Defense Department cost model as well as procurement reports. The estimates only cover construction, and don’t include other costs that ​could factor into the total if the buildings were to be rebuilt, such as debris removal and reinforcement. ​ 

*Report: Iranian Strikes Damaged Key U.S. Naval Base in Bahrain During War - Wall Street Journal*

* A new report says Iranian missile and drone attacks caused significant damage to the U.S. Navy's headquarters in Bahrain and other military facilities.
* The attacks are… pic.twitter.com/59uS1hQ4pm

— Global Osint (@GlobalOsintNew) June 26, 2026

"The estimated construction costs at NSA Bahrain totaled about $400 million," it continues. But ultimately a draw-back from these locations would be based on the proven reality that Iran can easily hit them at any time.

Some further implications to all this are that in any future flare-up or even return to all-out war between the US and Iran, American forces would find themselves executing a conflict much further away from the theatre itself. For example, dozens of major Air Force refueling tankers have already had to be relocated far away from the Gulf, to places like Tel Aviv. Many were destroyed in the opening weeks of the war while parked at Gulf airfields, clearly over-exposed as it seems Iran knew exactly where to target.

Back in late March, US officials admitted to the NY Times that Iran's significantly retaliation damaging US bases was "a war that is much harder to prosecute."

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 06:15

Russia's Lavrov Admits That Anchorage Only Bought Time For Ukraine To Rearm

Authored by Andrew Korybko,

Lavrov sheepishly said during a roundtable event last week that “I do not even want to suspect that Alaska, like the actions of the Europeans, was designed to buy time to rearm the Kyiv regime. I don’t even want to think about it. But in reality, things turned out the way they did.”

 

This came three and a half years after former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted in December 2022 that the Minsk Accords were just a ruse to buy time for Kiev to rearm.

Putin famously responded a month later that “We endured for a long time, tried to reach an agreement for a long time. But, as it turns out now, we were simply led by the nose, deceived. It’s not the first time this has happened.” Given that he cautioned Russia’s strategic forecasters against indulging in “wishful thinking” during a speech at the headquarters of his country’s Foreign Spy Service in summer 2022, it was widely assumed among “Non-Russian Pro-Russians” that he wouldn’t fall for a similar ruse.

Lo and behold, that’s precisely what happened after Trump reneged on the “Spirit of Anchorage”, which an RT contributor described as him having agreed to coerce Zelensky into withdrawing from Donbass in exchange for Putin then declaring a ceasefire. It’s a matter of speculation whether Trump intended to dupe Putin or whether he just caught too caught up in retrospect planning Maduro’s capture and the Third Gulf War. The outcome, nevertheless, is the same since Trump didn’t do what he promised Putin.

Trump is now “escalating to de-escalate” through a “war of attrition” because he senses weakness from Russia due to the new “cordon sanitaire” around it and thus believes that strengthening Ukraine’s strike capabilities, imposing more sanctions, and provoking unrest can coerce energy-related concessions. The Wall Street Journal reported on the aforementioned three-phase strategy last fall so Russia would have presumably been aware of it but still maintained hope that Trump would implement his deal with Putin.

This “wishful thinking” has now been shattered after he signed the G7 joint statement calling for more arms to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia, which preceded a report that he told Zelensky to act “more boldly” against Russia after being impressed by its recent US-backed strategic strikes. To be sure, Russia had realized even before this that something was wrong after Putin’s close advisor Yuri Ushakov played dumb about the “Spirit of Anchorage” last month, but now it’s indisputable that it no longer exists.

Seeing as how there’s no longer any credible hope that Trump will coerce Zelensky into withdrawing from Donbass by cutting off arms, funds, and intel to Ukraine, not even in exchange for a resource-centric strategic partnership with Russia, only three options remain for Russia.

1. It can either decisively “escalate to de-escalate” in its own right to swiftly end the conflict on as many of its terms as possible,

2. carry on as usual amidst this new “war of attrition” at tremendous risk to itself,

3. or freeze the conflict.

Unless he’s bluffing about “escalating to de-escalate” and abruptly implements his half of the “Spirit of Anchorage”, which is unlikely after all that’s recently happened, then it would mean that the past year since their meeting achieved nothing at all other than getting Russia’s guard down. Even if they agreed on that quid pro quo, however, Russia would have probably kept the same tempo. Now that its “spirit” is discredited, Russia has the pretext for ramping everything up, but it’s still unclear whether Putin will.

Tyler Durden Fri, 06/26/2026 - 23:25

The Average Asian American Household Makes More Than Double That Of Blacks

Median household income differs significantly across racial and ethnic groups in the United States, with one group sitting well above the rest.

In 2024, Asian households reported a median income of $121,700, nearly $30,000 higher than White alone, non-Hispanic households and more than double the median income of Black households.

These differences reflect a mix of factors, including education, geography, occupation, household composition, immigration patterns, and historical inequalities.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist's Bruno Venditti, ranks median household income by race and Hispanic origin in 2024, using inflation-adjusted dollars.

The data for this visualization comes from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Asian Households Lead by a Wide Margin

Asian households had the highest median income in 2024, at $121,700. This was well above every other group shown in the Census dataset.

White alone, non-Hispanic households ranked second, with a median income of $92,530. Hispanic households followed at $70,950.

American Indian and Alaska Native households had a median income of $59,050, while Black households had the lowest among the listed groups at $56,020.

Asian households had a median income that was $29,170 higher than White alone, non-Hispanic households in 2024.

This group has ranked at the top of the dataset for every year shown, from 2002 to 2024.

It is important to note that these are median household figures, not individual earnings. Household income can be affected by the number of earners in a household, local cost of living, age distribution, educational attainment, and where people live and work.

A Persistent Income Gap

The gap between the highest and lowest median household incomes was $65,680 in 2024.

That difference compares Asian households at $121,700 with Black households at $56,020. In practical terms, the top group’s median income was more than double the lowest group’s.

The long-term trend also shows that these gaps have persisted across multiple economic cycles. While incomes have generally risen since 2002 in inflation-adjusted terms, the distance between the highest- and lowest-income groups remains substantial.

Hispanic Household Income Continued to Rise

Hispanic households had a median income of $70,950 in 2024.

That was up from $67,240 in 2023, and well above the 2002 level of $54,670 in 2024 dollars.

The Census Bureau defines Hispanic as people of Hispanic or Latino origin, regardless of race. This means Hispanic households can include people who identify with any racial group.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Number of Indian Tribes in the US on Voronoi.

Tyler Durden Fri, 06/26/2026 - 23:00

The Other Problem With Socialism

Authored by Chris Talgo via American Thinker,

In 1976, Margaret Thatcher said during a television interview, "Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money."

Over the years, that quote has been whittled down to the renowned proverb: The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.

This is a powerful argument against socialism. Even better, it has been validated time and time again, most notably when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed in 1991. The Soviet Union was an economic basket case, and the whole world witnessed its demise.

But socialism has an even bigger problem: it is immoral.

Even if it did somehow work efficiently and effectively at an economic level, it would still be immoral.

A broad definition of "moral" is "conforming to a standard of behavior that is considered right and good by most people." Morality is synonymous with truth, honor, honesty, fairness, righteousness, and virtue.

Immorality is the antithesis of morality. It is synonymous with wickedness, callousness, evil, sin, vileness, viciousness, darkness, and ruthlessness.

Socialism, in its depraved but effective way, appeals to people's worst instincts and impulses. It presents the world as a zero-sum game in which there are winners and losers. It pits groups of people against each other based on arbitrary measures. For the narrow-minded, it makes sense.

It embodies most of the seven deadly sins.

Pride: Socialists have zero humility because they reject the fallibility of humanity. They can micromanage an entire society. They can create a centralized, one-size-fits-all, command-and-control utopia. They know all and know best.

Envy: Taking one's property because they have too much to give to others who have less is not noble; it is theft. Stealing with state-sanctioned approval is unjust. The sheer resentment that some have more, better, or bigger material possessions is the driving force of socialist ideology.

Wrath: Socialist doctrine fuels anger, rage, violence, and a desire for vengeance against the so-called oppressors. Instead of mimicking the successful, the people turn their ire toward them.

Sloth: Because socialism is about passing the buck and the blame, it excuses idleness and promotes laziness. It allows one to shirk personal duties and retards personal growth.

The above is far from a comprehensive list of socialism flaws or features, depending on where one sits on the moral relativity scale.

For those who outright reject moral relativism, deconstructionism, postmodernism, and critical theory in favor of universal truth, reason, logic, and fairness, socialism is obviously not up your alley.

Alas, for millions of Americans, especially Americans born after the Cold War, socialism has been branded very differently. Socialism has been presented to them with a smile. For America's youth, socialism is like a happy meal because it brings nothing but joy.

I know this from first-hand experience in several public schools over the years. It is no big secret that the K-12 education system leans left.

However, it is a well-kept secret that young Americans have been, and are being, indoctrinated that socialism is just, fair, and good in public schools. In the meantime, they are being purposely miseducated about American history, especially the nation's founding.

Such is why young Americans are champing at the bit to vote for socialists.

The left's long march through the institutions has created a culture that champions socialism under the misguided assumption that it is moral.

This is incredibly dangerous because these young minds are also unaware that socialism, as Thatcher said, leads to bankruptcy.

If socialism can be rebranded as morally wholesome despite its undisputed track record of mass murder, misery, and poverty, it can rise from the ashes in the United States.

It would be tragic if the United States, which fought on the side of freedom throughout the Cold War, succumbed to socialism in the end. I worry the rising tide of suicidal empathy, coupled with a lack of knowledge about socialism's history and sheer immorality, could bring a socialist revolution to the United States. I hope I am wrong.

Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is editorial director at The Heartland Institute.

Tyler Durden Fri, 06/26/2026 - 22:35