Etienne Note: I usually don't cover politics except in New Hampshire where the concentration of liberty movement activists through the free state project is starting to override Governor-level vetoes! Nothing wrong with voting defensively! This article is being syndicated as part of a recurring column in our weekly newsletter Five Meme Friday: libertarian Intentional Community Roundup where we cover libertarian and voluntaryist intentional communities and free private cities including Prospera (Honduras), The Free State Project (New Hampshire), Liberstad (Norway), Montelibero (Montenegro), Los Propietarios, (Argentina), Liberland (Croatia/Serbia border), Network States in general and Sea Steading (The Oceans). I am also covering secession movements including Greater Idaho, Please send details of any new happenings, projects or projects I am missing!

By Meryl Nass, Meryl’s CHAOS letter

The first set of slides are specific to HB-396. Other slides provide references and additional information on the crisis farmers are facing, and how HB-396 is the first step in turning the crisis around (and getting the federal government off the backs of small farmers by excessively regulating them and allowing food industry cartels to form, so that farming has become uneconomic). Becoming a farmer today is like taking a vow of poverty. And with the US currently failing to produce enough food for its population, the farming crisis is an impending food security crisis.

Ten of the slides are new; 14 are old. Let me know if you need more information. Below the slides is the bill language.

HB-396

AN ACT relative to the processing of cattle, swine, sheep, and goats at facilities not certified by the United States Department of Agriculture.

Be it Enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in General Court convened:

1 Exemptions; Food Service Licensure. Amend RSA 143-A:5, IX to read as follows:

IX. A farm owned or operated by any person, firm, or corporation that raises bison, elk, [or] red deer, cattle, swine, sheep, or goats for human consumption, and the direct sale within this state of the carcasses, parts, and meat[, and meat food products] of such animals, and meat food products of uninspected bison, elk, cattle, swine, sheep, goats, or red deer when slaughtered and processed in accordance with RSA 427:2-a, IV, to the consumer from such farm, at the producer’s farm stand, and by the producer at farmers’ markets, or when sold to a licensed restaurant in accordance with RSA 143-A:20.

2 Uninspected Bison, Elk, or Red Deer; Cattle, Swine, Sheep, and Goats Included. Amend RSA 143-A:18 to read as follows:

143-A:18 Definition of Uninspected Bison, Elk, [or] Red Deer, Cattle, Swine, Sheep, or Goats.

For purposes of this subdivision, “uninspected bison, elk, [or] red deer, cattle, swine, sheep, or goats“ means carcasses, parts, and meat[, and meat food products] of bison, elk, [or] red deer, cattle, swine, sheep, or goats, and meat food products of bison, elk, or red deer slaughtered and processed [in accordance with RSA 427:16, XII] and sold or to be sold [as provided in RSA 427:2-a, IV].

3 Labeling; Meat from Uninspected Bison, Elk, or Red Deer; Cattle, Swine, Sheep, and Goats Included. Amend RSA 143-A:19 to read as follows:

143-A:19 Labeling; Meat from Uninspected Bison, Elk, [or] Red Deer, Cattle, Swine, Sheep, and Goats.

All packaging containing uninspected bison, elk, [or] red deer, cattle, swine, sheep, or goats shall be clearly labeled to include a description of the product, the name, address, and telephone number of the farm where the product originates, and the date of slaughter.

4 Purchase of Uninspected Bison, Elk, or Red Deer by Licensed Restaurants; Cattle, Swine, Sheep, and Goats Included. Amend RSA 143-A:20 to read as follows:

143-A:20 Purchase of Uninspected Bison, Elk, [or] Red Deer, Cattle, Swine, Sheep, or Goats by Licensed Restaurants.

I. A licensed restaurant, as defined in RSA 143-A:14, II, may purchase from bison, elk, [or] red deer, cattle, swine, sheep, or goat producers uninspected bison, elk, [or] red deer, cattle, swine, sheep, or goat that is labeled in accordance with RSA 143-A:19.

II. For at least 90 days from the date of each purchase, the licensed restaurant shall keep on file the receipt of purchase to include the product purchased, the date of purchase, the name of the producer, the name and address of the farm, and phone number.

III. The licensed restaurant shall clearly label any menu item containing uninspected bison, elk, or red deer with the following statement: “This product was [slaughtered] initially processed at the farm and is exempt from state and federal inspection.”

III-a. The licensed restaurant shall clearly label any menu item containing uninspected cattle, swine, sheep, or goat with the following statement: “This product was initially processed at the farm and is exempt from state inspection.”

5 Purchase of Uninspected Bison, Elk, or Red Deer by Retailers; Cattle, Swine, Sheep, and Goats Included. Amend RSA 143-A:20-a to read as follows:

143-A:20-a Purchase of Uninspected Bison, Elk, [or] Red Deer, Cattle, Swine, Sheep, or Goat by Retailers.

I. A retailer may purchase from bison, elk, [or] red deer, cattle, swine, sheep, or goat producers uninspected bison, elk, [or] red deer, cattle, swine, sheep, or goat that is labeled in accordance with RSA 143-A:19 for resale.

II. For at least 90 days from the date of each purchase, the retailer shall keep on file the receipt of purchase to include the product purchased, the date of purchase, the name of the producer, the name and address of the farm, and phone number.

III. The retailer shall clearly label any product containing uninspected bison, elk, or red deer with the following statement: “This product was [slaughtered] initially processed at the farm and is exempt from state and federal inspection.”

IV. The retailer shall clearly label any product containing uninspected cattle, swine, sheep, or goat with the following statement: “This product was initially processed at the farm and is exempt from state inspection.”

6 Exemptions; Cattle, Swine, Sheep, and Goats. Amend RSA 427:2-a, IV to read as follows:

IV. The slaughter of bison, elk, [or] red deer, cattle, swine, sheep, or goats on a farm for purposes of sale, as provided in RSA 143-A:5, IX, shall be exempt from the provisions of this subdivision requiring inspection of the slaughter of animals and preparation of the carcasses, parts thereof, meat of such animals, and meat food products of bison, elk, or red deer for sale within this state to the public. The slaughter of a bison, elk, [or] red deer, cattle, swine, sheep, or goats under this paragraph shall be permitted only:

(a) When the owner of the bison, elk, [or] red deer, cattle, swine, sheep, or goat designates a slaughter area on the farm premises which is maintained in sanitary condition.

(b) When the bison, elk, [or] red deer, cattle, swine, sheep, or goat is slaughtered in a humane method, as defined in RSA 427:33, III, by the owner [or], the owner’s full time or seasonal employee, or the owner’s agent.

(c) [From September 1 to April 30.

(d)] When no more than 12 hours passes from the time of slaughter to the [placement] storage of the carcass [in a refrigerated facility] at or below 41 degrees Fahrenheit.

[(e)] (d) When a veterinarian licensed under RSA 332-B conducts an ante-mortem examination of each non-amenable herd on an annual basis and the documents related to his or her examination are kept on file with all relevant information including:

(1) Species being inspected;

(2) Herd condition; and

(3) Location and time of inspection.

[(f)] (e) When such non-amenable animal is transported to and processed at a facility that is eligible to conduct custom exempt activities as regulated by the USDA pursuant to 21 U.S.C. section 623(a) and associated departmental regulations.

[(g)] (f) When the owner of the bison, elk, or red deer retains the original copy of the report made in [subparagraph(e)] subparagraph (d). A copy of such report shall accompany the bison, elk, or red deer carcass to the processing facility. The processing facility shall retain a copy of the report for one year.

[(h)] (g) When bison, elk, or red deer meat is ground for sale, ground meat from every second animal processed shall be tested by the processing facility for Escherichia coli and salmonella at the owner’s expense. All aspects of the testing, including sampling, shall be done in a manner that complies with standards and procedures of the USDA, and may include the services of an outside laboratory. The owner of the meat shall not sell it until he or she is in receipt of the test result that indicates the product is safe to eat. The test result shall be kept by the owner for at least one year.

[(i)] (h) Prior to sale, as provided in RSA 143-A:5, IX, it is labeled as required in RSA 143-A:19.

[(j)] (i) When the elk or red deer are sourced, kept, and propagated consistent with the rules pursuant to RSA 207:14, RSA 212:25, and RSA 436:24.

[(k)] (j) When, in the event any atypical death of a red deer or elk on the farm, that animal’s carcass is tested for chronic wasting disease under rules established by the department of fish and game and the resulting test is negative.

V. No more than the following number of animals shall be processed per month under this paragraph:

(a) Three cattle.

(b) Five swine.

(c) Ten sheep or goats, or a combination thereof.

7 Department of Agriculture, Markets, and Food; Rulemaking. The department of agriculture, markets, and food, shall adopt rules under RSA 541-A relative to providing an annual training program for farmers to include, but not be limited to, training about safety, food quality, and product labeling and distribution.

8 Effective Date. This act shall take effect upon its passage.

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By Unbecoming, Lies are Unbecoming

Part of an ongoing series on remedies displaced from ordinary use because no one could own them.

Nothing here is medical advice. The dosages and applications come from Jethro Kloss’s 1939 encyclopedia of natural remedies, confirmed against current clinical references. In an acute poisoning, call poison control first. In the United States, the number is 1-800-222-1222. In Australia, it is 13 11 26. Every developed country has an equivalent. Charcoal is compatible with almost every emergency protocol; use it while help arrives, not instead of it.

In 1813, the French chemist Michel Bertrand swallowed five grams of arsenic trioxide mixed with activated charcoal. He suffered no apparent injury.¹

Seventeen years later, the pharmacist Pierre-Fleurus Touery repeated the experiment publicly. Standing before the assembled French Academy of Medicine in Paris, he swallowed ten times the lethal dose of strychnine mixed with fifteen grams of activated charcoal. He walked away unharmed.¹

The Academy witnessed the second demonstration. The proceedings were recorded and the mechanism was named. Anyone with a wood stove could produce the substance at home.

Two hundred years later, activated charcoal remains on the World Health Organization’s Model List of Essential Medicines, section 4.1, listed as a non-specific antidote for oral poisonings.² Every poison control center in the developed world stocks it. A jar sufficient to treat a household for years costs less than ten dollars.

Not a single mainstream physician recommends keeping it on the shelf at home.

The lineage

Documented medical use of charcoal reaches back at least to the physicians of Hippocratic Greece, around 400 BCE.¹ The substance sat in the European pharmacopeia through the centuries that followed, used both externally as a poultice and internally for stomach complaints.

The military took charcoal seriously earlier than modern medicine did. During World War I, activated charcoal was the adsorbent element in the gas masks issued to soldiers.¹ Men walked into clouds of chlorine and mustard gas and survived because the charcoal in their filters held the poisons on the pore walls long enough for them to breathe. Applied chemistry, verified under the most extreme experimental conditions imaginable.

By 1939, Jethro Kloss recorded what had happened next in his home country. Writing his encyclopedia of natural remedies, he noted in one sentence: *”Following the war, the use of charcoal in the United States was largely neglected.”*¹ He named two proximate causes. Household confusion of medicinal charcoal with burnt toast. And the pharmaceutical introduction of a mixture called the “universal antidote,” which combined charcoal with magnesium oxide and tannic acid, dulling its action.¹ The deeper cause he could not have named in 1939 would take another eighty years to become fully visible.

Kloss is the contemporaneous witness. A man writing in the middle of the shift saw it happening, named it, and moved on. The rest of the century completed what he was describing.

By 1963, the mainstream still knew what had been lost. Writing in the Journal of Pediatrics, John Holt described charcoal as “probably the most valuable single agent we possess” for ingested poisons, and added: *”A bottle of charcoal on every medicine shelf would go a long way to combat serious poisonings in the home.”*¹

Sixty years later, no medicine shelf has one.

How it works

Charcoal does not soak substances up. It holds them on its surface.

This distinction, technical as it sounds, is the whole story.

When water enters a sponge, the water fills the interior spaces of the material. The sponge absorbs. When arsenic or strychnine or chlorine gas meets charcoal, the molecules stick to the exposed surfaces of the carbon and cannot detach. The charcoal adsorbs. One letter, and the mechanism changes.

The surfaces involved are staggering. A piece of activated charcoal two-fifths of an inch square, once its internal pore structure is measured, presents an area of roughly thirty-three square yards. Larger than most living rooms. A tablespoon of powder holds within its microscopic honeycomb more binding surface than the interior walls of a modest house. A quart of charcoal can bind approximately ninety quarts of ammonia gas. The material holds on its surface between 250 and 350 times its own weight in captured substance.¹

The activation is a specific process. Wood is burned slowly under controlled low-oxygen conditions. Kloss specifies boxwood, coconut shells, willow, or pine as the preferred sources.¹ The volatile components drive off. What remains is a lattice of pure carbon riddled with microscopic pores. A second treatment, usually with steam or acid, opens the pores wider. The finished material is odorless, tasteless, and chemically inert until it meets something it can bind.

What it binds: strychnine, morphine, nicotine, barbiturates, salicylates, kerosene, opium, cocaine, most antidepressant drugs, and the majority of other pharmaceutical compounds.¹ It binds the gases produced by fermentation in the digestive tract, which are responsible for bloating, heartburn, and sour stomach. Applied over a bite or sting, it draws venom outward through the skin.

What it does not bind: lye and caustic alkalis, mineral acids, alcohol, iron, and cyanides.¹ These are the stated limits. Kloss listed them plainly. Any honest account of charcoal names them alongside the substances it does bind, because the material is not magic. It is chemistry.

The mechanism requires no biological model at all. It does not rest on germ theory. It rests on the physical properties of activated carbon. The charcoal binds the toxin, and the body then eliminates the charcoal and toxin together through the ordinary process by which the intestine passes waste.

Three objections

Three arguments will be raised against domestic charcoal use. Each deserves a direct answer.

The first is that charcoal binds nutrients as well as poisons. True. John Holt admitted it in the same article that praised the substance: *”It is now very clear that activated charcoal will adsorb not only poisons but also vitamins, digestive enzymes, amino acids, and other valuable nutrients from the gut. Such losses if continued will seriously affect health, but are of no importance in situations of acute poisoning.”*¹ The answer lives in the last clause. Charcoal is an acute intervention. It is not a daily supplement. Not a cleanse. Not a preventive. Taken across a few hours in response to a specific toxic event, the loss of some nutrients weighs nothing against the neutralization of a poison. Taken daily as an ongoing regimen, it becomes exactly the treadmill the supplement industry runs on, generating depletion while promising vitality. Use it when you need it. Put it back on the shelf when the need has passed.

The second objection is that the body cleanses itself, and intervention is unnecessary. Under ordinary conditions this is correct. The eliminative organs, meaning kidneys, liver, colon, skin, and lungs, handle the metabolic burden of ordinary living without external help. But acute toxic exposure is not ordinary. A wasp sting. Food poisoning. A drug overdose. A mushroom mistake. These are events in which the toxic load exceeds the body’s elimination capacity inside a specific window of time. Charcoal does not replace the body’s own work. It supports it by binding what would otherwise be reabsorbed through the enterohepatic circulation, the loop by which the liver dumps a toxin into the bile, the intestine reabsorbs the toxin into the blood, and the process repeats. Bind the toxin to charcoal in the intestine and the loop breaks. The body carries on with its own work. The intervention is limited, targeted, and stops when the acute phase ends.

The third objection is the most common: if charcoal were truly effective, mainstream medicine would use it. Mainstream medicine does use it. The 2025 WHO Model List of Essential Medicines names activated charcoal under section 4.1 as a first-line non-specific antidote for oral poisonings.² Every poison control center in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and continental Europe stocks it. It appears in the standard emergency-room protocol for suspected overdose. What does not appear anywhere, on any pharmacy shelf display, in any consumer leaflet, in any physician’s after-visit summary, is a recommendation to keep the substance at home. Charcoal is used where the patient cannot refuse the surrounding pharmaceutical protocol. It is not used where the patient could use it alone.

The most cited institutional skepticism about charcoal is a 2005 position paper from the American Academy of Clinical Toxicology and the European Association of Poisons Centres, published in Clinical Toxicology. It concludes that single-dose activated charcoal should not be administered routinely, that greatest benefit comes within one hour of ingestion, and that “there is no evidence that the administration of activated charcoal improves clinical outcome.”⁴ Read carefully, the paper confirms the mechanism in its own data. Fifty grams of activated charcoal reduces drug absorption by roughly 47 percent when given at thirty minutes and 40 percent at one hour.⁴ What is not confirmed is whether that reduction changes survival, and the paper acknowledges that “there are no satisfactorily designed clinical studies” of the question.⁴ The trials that would have proven clinical outcome benefit for a substance that costs pennies were never funded. Which is enough to keep charcoal in the hospital protocol, and enough to keep it off the home shelf.

That distinction sits at the center of the essay’s closing section.

What to keep on hand

The powdered form is the most effective. Capsules are twice as strong as tablets, but the powder mixed into water can be swallowed at once in a dose large enough to matter. Tablets are for chronic gas and indigestion, not for poisoning.¹

Coconut-shell activated charcoal is the modern standard. It comes from a renewable source and has very fine pore structure. Hardwood charcoal also works. Kloss’s original recommendation named boxwood, willow, and pine.¹

The one thing to avoid is charcoal briquettes sold for outdoor grilling. These contain binders, accelerants, and lighter-fluid residues. They are not activated in the medical sense and are not fit for internal use.

A four-ounce jar of activated charcoal powder costs six to ten dollars at current pricing. That quantity is sufficient for years of household use. Larger bulk containers cost a few dollars more. The economics of the substance explain why it generates almost no revenue. There is no repeat customer and no monthly renewal. A single jar sits on the shelf and comes down only when needed.

Storage matters. Charcoal adsorbs ambient volatiles from the air if left uncovered. Kitchen fumes, gasoline vapors, and cleaning products all exhaust its binding capacity before use. Keep it in a sealed glass or metal container. Old charcoal, Kloss notes, can be reactivated by heating.¹

How to use it

For digestive complaints (gas, heartburn, indigestion, food poisoning).

Stir one heaping teaspoon of charcoal powder into a glass of water until it forms a thin slurry. Drink at once. The taste is negligible; the texture is chalky. For persistent symptoms, repeat after two hours. The dose can be doubled without harm.¹

Take charcoal away from food and away from medications. It will bind both.

For acute poisoning (accidental ingestion of a toxic substance).

Five times the estimated weight of the ingested poison, in charcoal. Eight to ten times if food is already in the stomach. One tablespoon of charcoal powder equals approximately ten grams.¹ For an adult, this typically means two to four tablespoons stirred into a large glass of water and drunk immediately.

The sooner charcoal is taken after ingestion, the more effective it will be. Its window is the interval before the toxin has been absorbed out of the intestinal tract and into the bloodstream, usually the first hour or two.

Call poison control simultaneously. Charcoal is compatible with almost every emergency protocol, and the personnel on the phone will not object to its use. In most cases they will confirm it.

External use: the poultice.

Kloss’s recipe calls for equal parts pulverized charcoal and ground flaxseed. Grind the flaxseed fine in a coffee grinder first; the mixture will form a paste faster. Add enough water to form a thick paste and bring it slowly to a boil while stirring. Spread the paste about a quarter-inch thick on a piece of cotton or muslin cloth, keeping it one inch in from the edges. Cover with a second cloth. Apply to the affected area. Cover with a piece of plastic wrap slightly larger than the poultice. Wrap the whole thing with a towel or elastic bandage and pin in place.¹

Leave on for eight to ten hours, during the day or overnight.

When to reach for the poultice.

Insect bites and stings from bee, wasp, spider, and mosquito. The charcoal draws venom outward through the skin.

Poison oak and poison ivy reactions.

Wounds that will not close, chronic ulcers, boils and carbuncles coming to a head.

Inflammation around the eyes and ears.

Abdominal pain from digestive distress that has not resolved with internal charcoal.¹

Combinations Kloss records.

Charcoal with hops applied over the abdomen relieves gallstone pain quickly.

Charcoal moistened with smartweed tea works for bruises and general inflammation.

Charcoal in slippery-elm tea, equal parts, is used for gangrenous sores and stubborn ulcers.

Charcoal mixed with ground fenugreek seed as a paste treats ulcers and swellings. Kloss says the preparation will prevent what he calls “blood poisoning.”

Charcoal and olive oil worked to a paste, taken internally, addresses some forms of persistent indigestion.¹

None of these formulations is patented. Every one is reproducible in a home kitchen with materials that cost dollars. This is the point.

What happened to charcoal

Charcoal was not banned. No court order was issued against its use. What happened was displacement.

Every one of charcoal’s applications was replaced across the twentieth century by a dedicated pharmaceutical product line. The digestive complaints charcoal had handled for two millennia, including heartburn, indigestion, gas, and sour stomach, moved to antacids, then to H2 blockers, then to proton-pump inhibitors, a market now worth tens of billions of dollars annually. Wound care moved to topical antibiotics and a proliferating cascade of specialty dressings. Inflammation moved to steroid creams. Insect bites and stings moved to antihistamines and hydrocortisone. Poisoning management retreated inside the emergency room, where the encounter itself generated the revenue.

Each substitution meant a patented compound, a branded name, a supply chain, a marketing budget, a physician-education program funded by the manufacturer. Charcoal could not compete on those terms. Not because it worked less well. Because it worked too broadly and cost too little. It was the substance no one could own at the level that mattered.

The cholesterol category shows the pattern with fresh clinical evidence attached. In 1986, The Lancet published a Finnish study of patients with elevated cholesterol taking eight grams of activated charcoal three times daily for four weeks. Total cholesterol fell 25 percent, LDL fell 41 percent, and HDL rose 8 percent, with negligible side effects.⁵ Follow-up work through 1989 in the European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology confirmed the dose-response relationship and found charcoal comparable to cholestyramine, the prescription bile acid sequestrant it appeared to substitute for. Charcoal also did not raise triglycerides, which cholestyramine did.⁶ Then the trials stopped. No large-scale study of unpatentable charcoal against the emerging statin class was ever undertaken. Lovastatin was approved in 1987 and the cholesterol-lowering category became one of the most profitable in pharmaceutical history. The Finnish results were not refuted. They were simply not pursued.

Branded applications did proliferate in adjacent markets. Whitening toothpastes. Specialty capsules. Cosmetic face masks. These generate revenue on the label and the packaging rather than on the substance itself. The powdered charcoal in the plain glass jar, meaning the substance that matters for poisoning and digestive complaint and skin injury, remained unownable in the form that would have justified a marketing budget. So the marketing budget went to the packaged variants, and the powdered charcoal disappeared from ordinary awareness.

The exception is instructive. In the emergency room, charcoal survives. The 2025 WHO Model List of Essential Medicines still names it under section 4.1.² Poison control centers stock it. Emergency physicians are trained in its use. Consumer guidance, however, does not exist. There is no aisle at the pharmacy where the powder sits alongside antacids and acetaminophen. There is no leaflet from a pediatrician explaining what to keep on hand for accidental ingestion.

Even inside the emergency setting, the substance is being quietly reduced. The 2022 annual report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers documents that activated charcoal is now administered in fewer than 2.5 percent of exposure cases, a rate that has declined across two decades while more expensive interventions expand.³

The pattern is not concealment. A substance which anyone could hold in their kitchen was quietly repositioned into a clinical setting where the economics of the encounter absorbed the cheapness of the material. At home, charcoal displaces revenue. In the hospital, charcoal generates it, because the hospital charges for the visit, the assessment, the observation, and the bed. What changed was the location. The location determines who profits.

Kloss saw this in 1939. He named it in one sentence and moved on. He had eighty years of remedies still to catalog. The reader of Back to Eden today lives on the other side of the shift he was describing.

How to explain it to a six-year-old

If you burn wood the right way, slowly and with almost no air, it turns into a black powder that looks boring. But under a very strong microscope, that boring powder is full of tiny, tiny holes. So many holes that if you flattened just one spoonful of them out, they would cover a whole living room floor.

Bad things get stuck inside those holes and cannot get out. Poisons that shouldn’t be in your tummy. The sting from a bee. Once they are stuck, they cannot hurt you anymore.

Then the black powder walks out of you the normal way, and it takes the bad things with it.

People have known about this for thousands of years. Doctors still use it in hospitals today. But almost nobody has any in the cupboard at home anymore.

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By Rebecca Bellan, TechCrunch

As policymakers debate how to govern increasingly powerful AI systems like OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic’s Mythos, a Chinese open-weight model has narrowed the gap with the industry’s leaders.

GLM-5.2, the open-weight AI model from China’s Z.ai, is only a few months behind OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7 on cyber and bio capabilities, according to a new report from AI safety nonprofit SaferAI. But the divide between frontier capabilities and safety practices is growing.

According to SaferAI’s evaluation, which the nonprofit ran via Z.ai’s public API, GLM-5.2 refused none of the offensive cyber or biology tasks it was given. By comparison, Claude Opus 4.7 “refused so consistently that SaferAI could not complete CyberGym on it at all.” (CyberGym is a benchmark that evaluates cybersecurity capabilities. OpenAI used it in the evaluation that preceded last month’s Hugging Face breach.)

It’s a stark reminder of what some critics have warned for years: that open-weight AI models could put highly capable AI into the hands of potential attackers, with no way to police how they use the technology once they download the weights. With open-weight models rapidly approaching the capabilities of the world’s leading AI systems, the debate is moving from whether they can compete to how society manages risks once they are released.

“The frontier of capability is not the frontier of risk, and so we do have to take into account the state of the mitigations as well to assess the risk properly,” Henry Papadatos, executive director of SaferAI, told TechCrunch.

While Z.ai could apply safety measures to its hosted API, those protections become unenforceable once someone runs the weights on their own hardware, where they can remove or modify any safeguards, fine-tune the models, or change system prompts.

Frontier developers like OpenAI and Anthropic tend to rely on safeguards like classifiers, refusal training, and API-level controls to limit dangerous cyber and biological assistance.

Those measures are far from foolproof: jailbreaks routinely bypass protections on deployed models. Far.ai, an AI safety nonprofit, found hundreds of universal jailbreaks — defined as reusable keys that succeed on most harmful requests — in frontier models like xAI’s Grok 4.5 and Google DeepMind’s Gemini 3.1 Pro. According to the report, jailbreaks succeed when attackers combine multiple manipulation techniques — including roleplaying, authority impersonation, fake conversation history, and follow-up prompts — to amplify weak points in a model’s defenses.

But the safeguards in place for closed models don’t work at all on open-weight models, which are designed to run on any infrastructure with any set of safeguards — or lack thereof.

“The objective should clearly be that the good capabilities — the safe ones — are accessible to anyone, and then we try to remove the bad ones, even in an open source fashion,” Papadatos said.

One technique Papadatos noted could help is called “pre-training data filtering,” which is when an AI company removes offensive cybersecurity information from their training data and then trains the model on the curated dataset.

Some research suggests this can reduce hazardous biological knowledge without harming overall model performance. However, for cybersecurity, data filtering is much less practical.

It’s difficult to train a general model that excels at coding but isn’t also a good hacker. Because coding has become AI’s biggest moneymaker, developers face pressure to keep improving those capabilities even as they search for ways to limit misuse.

Because of that, frontier developers have increasingly relied on other mitigations instead. One approach has been to selectively restrict the kinds of cybersecurity assistance models will provide. Anthropic’s Opus 5, for example, can search for vulnerabilities in uncompiled source code, but not compiled software, per the model’s system card. The reasoning is that this makes it harder to use Opus 5 for offensive purposes.

Others include rigorous pre-deployment safety evaluations, publishing risk assessments, and withholding model weights if a system is perceived as too dangerous.

In GLM-5.2’s case, SaferAI says Z.ai didn’t publish a safety framework, pre-deployment testing commitments, or risk assessment for the model. TechCrunch has asked Z.ai whether it conducted internal or third-party frontier safety evaluations before release, but did not receive a response.

Chinese leaders have increasingly acknowledged the risks of advanced AI. At the World AI Conference last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasized the importance of open-weight models, while also stressing the necessity of ensuring AI remains a tool under strict human control.

Graham Webster, who studies Chinese AI policy at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, told TechCrunch that China has robust regulations governing AI, but those rules have historically focused on politically sensitive content, misinformation, and social stability rather than catastrophic AI risks like offensive cyber capabilities and biological misuse.

“U.S. AI thinkers are, in general, more concerned with this existential catastrophic [idea] than the Chinese community,” Webster said, adding that many Chinese policy researchers believe that if there’s truly going to be a novel frontier risk, American companies will likely encounter it first.

“The Chinese system has confidence that they control the use of these technologies inside China,” Webster continued. “Being online in China is something you do attributed to your real name, and companies can be held accountable, users can be held accountable.”

Webster mused that the same mechanism that model providers use for refusing to engage on certain political topics can potentially be tweaked to make sure models refuse to complete offensive cyber attacks or won’t deliver adverse biological engineering outcomes. He added that because Chinese companies tend to coordinate with regulators behind the scenes, it can be tough to know what internal testing they’re conducting before release.

Advocates of open-weight AI argue that releasing the weights is important for cybersecurity because it allows companies defend themselves against attacks — Hugging Face relied on GLM-5.2 to defend itself against OpenAI’s breach — and because it allows them to better prepare for future threats if they know what’s coming.

“The same systems that helped stop an AI-powered cyberattack can now help defend against millions of cyberattacks every day, while helping us identify and fix vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them,” Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, said this week in a social media post.

Papadatos said that benefit is often overstated, and doesn’t mean “we should open-source dangerous capabilities.”

“The main point in my mind is that we shouldn’t just accept that dangerous capabilities are easily accessible by anyone anywhere,” he said, stressing that he believes the industry should be striving for only making the “good capabilities” easily accessible. By default attackers adopt new tools faster than defenders do. For example, a ransomware group can change its methods in a week. A hospital cannot.”

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By Alan MacLeod, MintPress News

Raytheon sponsors the Girl Scouts of America. BAE Systems is reading your toddlers their favorite fairytale stories. And Lockheed Martin funds children’s math and STEM festivals. This is done with great fanfare, supposedly to empower and inspire children to pursue their passion for science. In reality, though, these companies are attempting to launder their images and enlist the next generation to become cogs in the military-industrial complex.

All the while, these organizations’ products are being used across the world by the United States and Israel to commit war crimes – in Iran, Yemen, Palestine, and beyond – to target children.

MintPress explores the murky world of the arms companies training kids to bomb kids.

Normalizing War to Kids

When many Americans think of Raytheon (now officially rebranded as RTX Corporation), they don’t envisage rockets and cruise missiles; they think of math. For decades, the second-largest arms manufacturer on the planet has bankrolled a wide range of organizations aimed at getting children excited about STEM subjects.

Since 2009, Raytheon has been the title sponsor of MATHCOUNTS, a non-profit organization that provides engaging math programs for middle school students in every U.S. state, as well as organizing math competitions to find the brightest children in America.

In 2005, Raytheon launched its MathMovesU program, aimed, in its own words, “to inspire middle school students to get excited about math and science.” In addition to the materials provided, it has also spent millions on scholarships, grants, and study awards to thousands of students, teachers, and volunteers.

And its MathAlive! traveling exhibit promises, in rather outdated branding, to take math “2theXtreme”. MathAlive! Has also traveled to several countries in West Asia, including Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia – all of them among the biggest purchasers of Raytheon weapons technology.

The company also enjoys a longtime partnership with the Girl Scouts of the United States of America (GSUSA). In 2017, for example, it launched the GSUSA’s first national computer science program and cyber challenge for middle and high school girls.

“The progress to diversify the STEM workforce needs to be accelerated… At a time when technology is transforming the way we live and work, we can – and should – show young women a clear path to taking an active role in this transformation,” said Thomas A. Kennedy, then-Raytheon CEO; “Working together, Raytheon and Girl Scouts will help girls build confidence to see themselves as the robotics engineers, data scientists and cybersecurity professionals who will create a better tomorrow.”

Raytheon also spearheaded the GSUSA’s “Think Like a Programmer” project, which encourages girls to explore the world of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, and developed many of the programming badges available to the scouts.

GSUSA appears proud of this relationship. Its website profiles one former scout who now works at Raytheon as a success story and a model to follow. The article includes a step-by-step guide and a list of tips for those wishing to follow in her footsteps.

Unsurprisingly, Raytheon also works closely with the U.S. military on these matters, establishing four new STEM “centers of innovation” with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America in Michigan, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Washington, D.C., all near military bases.

While some might be surprised by the closeness of the relationship between a children’s organization and an arms manufacturer, it is worth remembering that the scouting movement was originally established by Lieutenant-General Robert Baden-Powell, as a stepping stone towards boys joining the military. Baden-Powell was deeply concerned that English boys would not be physically fit enough to fight for their country in any upcoming wars, and designed an organization that would train them both physically and mentally to do so.

Kirsten Bayes from the Campaign Against the Arms Trade was unimpressed by Raytheon’s attempts to improve their image and to train the next generation of weapons manufacturers. “Our view is that arms companies have no place in schools or colleges, and should certainly not be working with children’s educational charities,” she told MintPress, adding:

“Schools and other places of education should be places where children learn, grow and develop their full potential. They should not be a recruiting ground where arms companies whitewash their activities.”

Lockheed Martin U

But Raytheon is far from the only weapons giant directly targeting America’s children. Lockheed Martin hosts CYBERQUEST, an annual high school competition that encourages children to pursue careers in intelligence and cybersecurity. The 2026 event was held in 11 locations across the country, as well as virtually around the world. The arms giant offers high school internship programs designed to fast-track America’s brightest young minds into careers in defense. Every year, Lockheed Martin hires thousands of young interns, and claims that 60% of these candidates go on to paid work at the company.

It also sponsors “young minds at work” days, setting up hands-on experiments for children to play with, including bottle rocket experiments and more.

Universities are a key recruitment ground. The corporation spends huge sums attracting top talent, including hosting “Lockheed Martin Day” at more than a dozen colleges nationwide, where company recruiters are allowed on campus to dazzle students with virtual reality exhibitions, flight simulators, and even landing helicopters directly on college greens.

Lockheed Martin has entered into partnerships with several top colleges. A $1.5 million donation to the University of Texas at Arlington, for instance, resulted in the renamed of one of their buildings as the Lockheed Martin Career Development Center.

The company touts its reputation as a safe space for women and LGBT employees, and is regularly listed as one of the best employers for inclusivity. One woman the company itself profiles is Haley, who, as a girl, dreamed of becoming an inventor. “As a child,” they write, “Haley clung to a notebook where she sketched her ideas and inventions. On the cover she scribbled, ‘Haley’s Way to Make Life Better.’ Her best idea? A self-folding Christmas tree cleverly called ‘Merry, Bright and Boxed’ to make cleaning up after the holidays more efficient.” Today, that child with dreams of making the world a better place is a missiles and fire control engineer with Lockheed Martin, developing weapons that efficiently kill people all across the planet.

Targeting Toddlers

Boeing, too, has developed a number of projects aimed at young children. Their “Engineering is Elementary” program is designed for pre-K, kindergarten, elementary and middle school students, and, like those from Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, is focussed on funnelling young minds into a career in weapons manufacturing. “Boeing has a strategic community focus to increase teacher effectiveness in math and science and to attract more students into STEM-related careers,” a company representative said, adding,

“Engineering is Elementary provides teachers and students a greater understanding of engineering, and it accomplishes that in a fun, interactive way. Our goal is to interest students in engineering at an early age and increase the number of scientists and engineers.”

Aerospace manufacturer BAE Systems, however, goes even further. The London-based giant that produces jet aircraft, missiles, howitzers, and warships published a series of bizarre videos featuring both its employees and members of the British Armed Forces reading classic fairytales to children. This included Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel. These came complete with worksheets to help extremely young children with their problem-solving skills.

Reading bedtime stories to babies is just part of a wider strategy BAE Systems is conducting in order to, in their own words, “improve our corporate reputation at both a local and national level.” Other initiatives include hosting school roadshows, robotics festivals, science camps, and local community outreach programs, all aimed at children. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it also stepped in to provide schools with branded learning materials for children as young as five.

Bayes appeared appalled at the company’s actions, stating:

“We are aware that BAE Systems claims to spend as much as £100m [U.S.$134m] per year on educational activities. It claims its motives are community based, but we would say that this is part of their recruiting strategy: seeking to influence young people without presenting the full facts of what an arms company is, and what the consequences of working for them would be.”

Fairytales and Nightmares

As much as these companies attempt to present themselves neutrally as scientific entities, the reality is that their primary businesses revolve around producing the hardware and weaponry that the United States uses to dominate the world.

In the past twelve months alone, the United States has bombed seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. And it is companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin that make this kind of extraordinary planetary violence possible.

For example, on February 28, the United States launched an attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ School in Minab, Iran. A Tomahawk cruise missile – one of the most precise guided weapons on the planet – was launched from a nearby warship and pummelled the building, causing the school to collapse in on itself. Soon after, a second missile hit the school’s courtyard, where desperate survivors were gathering.

The attack was timed precisely for maximum damage: 10:45am on a school day. At least 156 people were killed, most of them pupils at the school, which neither served any military purpose, nor was located near any military target. Over 100 more were injured.

The event was immediately denounced as a major war crime. But Secretary of War Pete Hegseth brushed it off, and later stated that, “The only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians who think they’re going to live.”

The Tomahawk cruise missile is produced by Raytheon, and subsystems used in the operation were made by a subsidiary of BAE Systems.

Washington also uses its primacy in weapons to keep its allies in power. Saudi Arabia is by far the U.S.’ top arms customer, purchasing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of hi-tech weaponry, which it immediately uses against Yemen, and to suppress domestic dissent.

Riyadh has pursued a genocidal attack on civilian infrastructure in Yemen, including against farms, sewage, and water facilities, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. In August 2018, it dropped a 227 kg (500lb) laser-guided bomb on a school bus in Dhahyan, northern Yemen. Fragments found at the scene identified the bomb as having been produced by Lockheed Martin. Forty children were killed in the attack – a far from uncommon occurrence during the Saudi-led campaign to topple Ansar Allah from power.

If Saudi Arabia is Washington’s biggest customer, then Israel is its prime recipient of welfare. A study from Brown University found that in the two years following the October 7, 2023 attack, the United States spent $21.7 billion on military aid to Israel, including aircraft, missiles, and all manner of small arms munitions.

Israel has used these weapons to systematically target children in Gaza and beyond. At least 97% of schools in the densely-populated strip have been hit. One of the more notable examples was the Khadija Girls’ School in Deir al-Balah, which was targeted on July 27, 2024. A Human Rights Watch investigation found that Israel dropped at least two GBU-39 bombs on the school – munitions manufactured in the United States by Boeing.

Thus, while arms manufacturers read fairytales to Western kids, children across the world are forced to live out a very real nightmare, thanks in no small part to these companies.

Whether they live in the United States or one of the countries under its boot, however, children everywhere are being targeted by these weapons firms, though in different ways. In the United States, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and others have stepped in to bolster cash-strapped education departments. While their rhetoric emphasizes empowering children – especially girls – to follow their science dreams, their true intent is to launder their reputations as merchants of death, and to train up the next generation of Americans to become willing members of the American war machine.

Children on the other side of the globe, however, are given no such illusions, and have to live with the constant terror that they be these companies’ next victims. This image, is not the one the likes of Raytheon want us to think about when we picture their products, and so they spend millions attempting to distract us with stories of empowerment and discovery. What a world we live in, where weapons companies are training kids to bomb kids.

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By StudyFinds Analysis

The More People Swipe and Scroll, the Less Love Seems To Matter, Research Suggests

For millions of adults, finding a romantic partner now begins with a phone screen. Dating apps have become as ordinary as grocery shopping, and adult websites attract billions of visits every month. A new study suggests that when engagement with either platform turns compulsive, people’s sense that romantic love is meaningful and worth taking seriously may be associated with how they use these tools, at least among the Iranian adults studied.

Researchers surveyed 664 Iranian adults who had used a dating app within the past year and had watched adult videos for at least 30 minutes per week over the prior month. Those who scored higher on measures of problematic use, meaning addiction-like patterns such as restlessness, failed attempts to cut back, and conflict in daily life caused by the habit, reported lower existential reflection on love and lower perceived meaningfulness of love. The accepted study, available online in BMC Psychology ahead of final editing, raises a meaningful question about how adults in this Iranian sample perceived the significance of romantic love.

This is not simply a story about cynical people gravitating toward cynical platforms. The study’s authors argue that experiences baked into these platforms, including rapid judgments based on a handful of photos, shallow conversations, frequent rejection, and adult content that emphasizes physical gratification over intimacy, may gradually be associated with shifts in how users think about romantic relationships. That framing is the authors’ interpretation, not a demonstrated pathway, since the study’s design cannot confirm cause and effect.

The Sample Came From Iranian Psychology Channels Online, Not a National Survey

Participants were 664 Iranian adults with an average age of about 26, ranging from 18 to 60. Roughly 54 percent were female, and 59 percent identified as single. The survey was advertised through Iranian psychology social media channels and completed online, so the sample was self-selected rather than nationally representative.

Researchers used established psychological scales to measure how problematic each participant’s dating app use and adult video consumption had become, looking for addiction-like signs distinct from simple frequency of use: a growing need for more engagement to feel satisfied, failed attempts to cut back, and conflicts in daily life caused by the habit. Participants were also asked whether they reflected on love’s deeper meaning, whether love felt meaningful to their lives, whether they held practical or skeptical views about love, and whether they tended to develop romantic feelings quickly. Researchers then ran a statistical test that measures how strongly different factors move together, linking these behaviors to participants’ views on love while accounting for age, gender, education, relationship status, and sexual orientation.

Both Habits Track With a More Transactional View of Love

Both problematic dating app use and problematic adult video consumption were positively associated with stronger agreement in practical and skeptical beliefs about love, including beliefs about money, as well as higher scores on emotional promiscuity, a pattern of developing romantic feelings quickly, frequently, and with less selectivity. The two problematic behaviors were also positively correlated, meaning people who struggled with one were more likely to struggle with the other.

There was one bright spot. Participants who used social media mindfully, meaning they stayed consciously aware of what they were doing online instead of scrolling on autopilot, showed substantially lower levels of both problematic dating app use and problematic pornography consumption. Researchers did not test this directly, but they suspect the same habit of paying attention rather than zoning out could carry over from one app to another, offering a practical foothold for anyone looking to change their own patterns.

Rapid Swiping and Impersonal Content May Erode Faith in Love

Dating apps, by design, encourage rapid evaluation: a person is swiped left or right within seconds based on a few images and a short bio, and post-match conversations often stay shallow or fizzle out quickly. Authors of the study offer one possible interpretation, not something directly tested: for users with the highest levels of problematic engagement, seeing partners as easily replaceable, and love as fleeting, may become a kind of psychological adaptation to an environment that rewards transactional thinking.

Adult videos, meanwhile, focus heavily on physical pleasure while largely sidelining emotional intimacy. For people showing signs of problematic or difficult-to-control use, the authors similarly speculate that the cumulative effect may weaken the sense that committed, meaningful love is desirable or realistic. Separate prior research cited by the authors, though not measured directly in this sample, has found some problematic users escalate toward more extreme content over time. These mechanisms are plausible, but this study’s design cannot confirm them.

A Snapshot Study Can’t Prove What Caused What

Because this was a snapshot study, it cannot prove that these platforms caused changes in how people view love. People who already hold more transactional views of romance may simply be more likely to use these platforms compulsively, and a mutually reinforcing cycle is also plausible. As noted, the sample was self-selected rather than representative of Iranian adults broadly, faced government restrictions on dating apps and adult videos that required a VPN to access, and relied on self-reports that carry a risk of underreporting given social stigma.

What the study leaves behind is a simple, unsettling possibility: the tools built to help people find love may, for the people who lean on them hardest, be quietly changing what love means.

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Etienne Note: Another example of why “government” and “democracy” are the dumbest way to organize society. In addition to both being morally illegitimate and the whole process being easily rigged, even if you can “vote the bums out” there is no guarantee they will actually leave!

By Livia Albeck-Ripka, The New York Times

Earlier this year, the voters of Avenal, a community in California’s rural Central Valley, ousted their mayor and all but one member of their City Council.

Leaders of the recall celebrated the effort as democracy in action.

The message: Get out.

But more than three months after the election, the recalled officials still won’t leave, claiming the process was unlawful. At a meeting in June, they made it official, voting 3 to 0 to ignore the results.

Their refusal to cede power — highly unusual even in an era of election denialism — raises a host of legal and political questions and has triggered one of the messiest recall battles in modern California history.

Town halls have devolved into screaming matches. Residents have accused one another of spreading falsehoods and malicious A.I.-generated memes, and of racially charged jabs. In the former oil boomtown turned migrant farming community, one recall supporter asked the ousted mayor, who emigrated from Tijuana as a teenager, if he needed something translated into Spanish.

Avenal now finds itself at the unlikely center of a debate that has plagued federal, state and local races across the country: What happens when elected officials refuse to follow democratic norms?

Mr. Preciado, right, speaking to reporters at Kings County Superior Court in June after a hearing over the recall effort.

Some experts said the situation was a microcosm of a growing distrust of the elections process, fanned by President Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 presidential race.

“It’s very concerning to me that we have a situation in our nation where if we don’t like election results, we say it’s rigged,” said Cathy Darling Allen, a retired election official and the chair of the board of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation.

“That behavior is being modeled,” Ms. Allen added, “at the highest levels in our nation.”

Recalled officials are required by state law to leave office right after votes are certified. In Avenal, because four of the five Council seats were vacated simultaneously, those positions would ordinarily have been filled by a special election.

But the recalled mayor, Alvaro Preciado — who also is a member of the Council — maintains that the county was not authorized to run the election in the first place. He does not see himself as an election denier.

“I am not refusing to step down, I am just waiting for the due process to be completed,” Mr. Preciado said, referring to ongoing legal proceedings between the recall supporters, county and ousted officials.

Avenal sits roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, tucked into the hills that many Californians see as a blur as they zip along Interstate 5. The city, with less than 14,000 people, has a landfill and a large state prison whose inmates make up just over a quarter of the population. A majority of residents identify as Hispanic or Latino. The city is the smallest of four in Kings County, a part of California known for its dairy, pistachios and attachment to the status quo.

On a couple of blocks with churches, taquerias and variety stores, some residents said they knew little of the recall dispute or had chosen to remain out of it. One said she was unable to vote in the recall election because of her legal status. Another said he resented that it had become the first thing some people brought up when you walked into a room.

“People don’t even say, ‘How are you doing?’” said Carlos Pena, 38, who runs a restaurant on the main street that is also the community’s only bar. “First thing is: ‘So, what do you think?” he added. “What side are you on?’”

The recall effort began more than a year ago, set off by a controversy over the local fire department. Rather than rely on Kings County, city leaders said they would set up their own, volunteer-run service. Residents of the isolated community panicked. Some accused city officials of making the decision behind closed doors.

Other grievances had also been accumulating. Dalila Barajas, 50, a longtime resident, was also fed up by what she called a lack of transparency, accountability and respect for the community.

“I’m like, ‘OK, the only way that this is going to get fixed is if we start a recall,” she said.

Ms. Barajas, a former county employee, joined with two other women: Veronica Loya, 56, who works for an environmental justice organization and fears that the city’s large landfill is toxic to the community; and Ginger Wallis, 50, whose family has lived in Avenal for generations and has close ties to the county fire department.

Ms. Wallis and Ms. Barajas, who describes herself as a fourth-generation Mexican American, also expressed frustration that City Council members were pushing aside the city’s historical traditions to cater to the immigrant community. They said they were disappointed that an annual celebration of the city’s origins, known as Old Timers Day, now featured Spanish music and Lucha Libre wrestling.

“Pretty soon the actual roots of Avenal are going to be gone,” Ms. Barajas said.

Ginger Wallis and Dalila Barajas, two of the residents pushing for a recall.

The women organized and rallied, and Ms. Barajas and Ms. Wallis knocked on the doors of more than 1,500 homes, collecting 650 signatures — 124 more than they needed — to trigger the recall, they said.

In April, more than 76 percent of voters supported recalling the mayor, Mr. Preciado, and three other Council members, Leticia Gamez, David Reynosa and Pablo Hernandez. (The women spared the only other Council member, Ricardo Verdugo, because they said they saw him as an ally.)

But at City Hall, a cramped building where residents still pay bills in person, business continued to proceed largely as usual.

“I said, ‘Well, something is not right, something was done illegal,’” said Mr. Preciado, 67, who has been an elected official in Avenal for 16 years.

He said he believed recall organizers had misled residents about what they were voting for, and obtained signatures from people who no longer lived in the city. He said he also did not trust the county to verify the signatures.

Both the county and recall organizers maintain that the election was conducted in accordance with state law.

Another of the recalled Council members, Mr. Hernandez, 57, said he was saddened to be recalled after eight years of service.

“It’s part of my life — how could I?” said Mr. Hernandez, who on a balmy evening in late June was at the local movie theater leading a round of Lotería, the Mexican card game. “Maybe that’s a legal thing,” he added, “but my heart doesn’t understand that.”

Some of the ousted leaders and their supporters have accused recall proponents of being emboldened by the Trump administration to lead a partisan, racially motivated campaign. All of the recalled officials are Latino.

Recall organizers said they never discussed their party affiliations with one another, since they were focused on local issues, and they rejected the idea that the campaign was in any way racially motivated.

“That’s their cop-out,” said Ms. Loya, the recall organizer who works for an environmental justice group. “I’m Hispanic, I’m Latina,” she added, “and I’m proud.”

Mr. Preciado celebrating with residents after watching the Mexico vs. Ecuador game.Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times

The conflict may take months to resolve.

The California attorney general has granted the recall organizers permission to sue the ousted officials in a quo warranto lawsuit, a rarely used legal remedy that could force the officials from office. That case is still making its way through the courts.

Separately, the district attorney’s office for Kings County has opened a criminal investigation, ordering raids on City Hall as well as on the homes of the recalled officials and the city manager. It has also demanded that the recalled officials stop spending taxpayers’ money.

Both Ms. Barajas and Ms. Wallis are now running for City Council.

In early July, Mr. Verdugo, the only Council member who was not recalled, held a special meeting at an elementary school cafeteria to appoint himself the new mayor.

Without a quorum, the declaration was unlawful, but Mr. Verdugo said he did not see it as an issue.

“The other three were illegitimate meetings also,” Mr. Verdugo told news outlets at the time, in reference to recent City Hall meetings held by the ousted officials.

“So, what’s the difference?” he said.

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How much money does it take before earning more no longer makes people happier? Researchers call this threshold the satiation point, and it varies considerably across the United States.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Niccolo Conte, ranks 50 of the most populous U.S. cities by the annual income at which self-reported life evaluation stops improving, using data from Remitly.

Remitly adapted Purdue University‘s income satiation research by adjusting it for purchasing power and inflation, then scaling the U.S. figure to each metro using Numbeo’s cost-of-living index.

Coastal U.S. Cities Have the Highest Price of Happiness

Nationally, happiness levels off at an estimated annual income of $134,827. In New York City, the threshold rises to $195,969, or 45.3% above the national figure.

New York is followed by Honolulu ($192,441) and San Francisco ($191,266). In all three cities, the estimated income threshold exceeds $190,000 a year.

The table below shows the price of happiness in each of the 50 cities and how each compares with the $134,827 U.S. average:

The upper end of the ranking is dominated by coastal cities. California alone claims five of the top 10 spots: San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Berkeley, and San Diego. Seattle ($176,960), Washington, D.C. ($171,081), and Boston ($168,925) also rank among the most expensive cities.

Overall, 35 of the 50 cities have income thresholds above the national figure, partly reflecting the higher living costs found in many of America’s largest metropolitan areas.

Where Happiness Costs the Least in America

Cincinnati has the lowest estimated price of happiness in the ranking at $122,480, or 37.5% less than New York. Put another way, reaching income satiation in New York requires about 1.6 times as much income as it does in Cincinnati.

Texas is the most heavily represented state near the affordable end of the ranking. Austin ($130,123), Houston ($125,224), and San Antonio ($123,656) all place in the bottom 10, alongside Albuquerque, Tucson, and Jacksonville. Dallas is the only Texas city in the upper half, ranking 22nd.

The pattern closely tracks broader cost-of-living differences between U.S. metros, which also shape the income needed to live comfortably in U.S. cities. Where housing and everyday expenses are lower, the estimated income required to reach the plateau falls as well.

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Etienne Note: This article also appears in “Government”, Media and Academia Criminality Exposed, A digest of HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of articles exposing and suggesting inter-generational organized crime’s control of the “Government,” Media and Academia by the Art of Liberty Foundation. You can view the other articles or subscribe on Telegram: https://t.me/Government_Scams

By Martin Armstrong, Armstrong Economics

Private land may be seized to construct transmission lines required by the rapidly expanding AI data-center industry. If a property owner refuses to sell an easement voluntarily, a utility may resort to eminent domain, provided the project is declared a “public use” and the owner receives what the government calls “just compensation.” Let us call this what it is: legalized theft.

The government does not ask whether the land has been in your family for generations, whether you built your home with your own hands, or whether the money offered would ever replace what is being destroyed. A bureaucrat determines the supposed market value, a judge blesses the taking, and armed government agents will eventually remove you if you continue to resist. They hide behind legal phrases because “confiscation for corporate benefit” would expose the practice for what it has become.

The United States already has more than 3,000 data centers, with another 1,500 under development. These facilities consumed more than 4% of total US electricity in 2024, and demand is rising rapidly as companies construct gigawatt-scale AI campuses. New transmission lines must cross somebody’s property, and when the owner says no, the state may simply decide that no does not matter.

Seventy percent of Americans reportedly oppose having a data center built near their community. These facilities can consume enormous quantities of electricity and water while creating noise, traffic, pollution, and higher infrastructure costs. Health risks are not fully understood although reports of increased cancer risks are prevalent in communities near these facilities. Yet the same governments that claim to represent the public are preparing to override that opposition because the technology companies have more influence than the families whose land stands in their way.

This is already happening. CBS News reported that Georgia Power acquired more than 300 parcels for a transmission project intended largely to serve data centers. The utility said that between 70% and 80% of the new line’s capacity would support data-center demand. Families were informed that if they refused the proposed sale, Georgia Power could pursue condemnation.

Ansley Brown’s family sold the home her grandparents had built after receiving an eminent-domain notice. She called the process “theft,” and she was absolutely correct. Georgia Power would not even identify the data-center companies benefiting from the project, citing customer confidentiality. The landowner must surrender everything, but the corporate beneficiary is permitted to remain hidden. That tells you exactly who the government serves.

The Fifth Amendment states that private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation. The government has twisted those words beyond recognition. A transmission line that principally benefits unnamed private technology corporations is now presented as a public necessity merely because the electricity passes through the broader grid. Under that reasoning, nearly any private commercial project can be disguised as public infrastructure.

The Supreme Court opened the floodgates with Kelo v. City of New London in 2005. The Court ruled 5–4 that private property could be taken and transferred to another private party as part of an economic-development plan. The politicians promised jobs, tax revenue, and revitalization. The proposed Pfizer-related development never materialized as promised, and much of the condemned neighborhood remained vacant for years. Families lost their homes so politicians could gamble with property that was never theirs.

I have written about the abuse of eminent domain repeatedly because it destroys the very foundation of a free society. In South Dakota, around 80 farmers faced eminent-domain lawsuits connected to the Summit Carbon Solutions pipeline. Surveyors entered private property while the government protected the corporation rather than the owners. The project was sold under the ESG banner, just as these latest confiscations will be sold under the banners of AI, grid reliability, national competitiveness, and technological progress.

In New Jersey, officials moved to seize the Henry family’s profitable 21-acre farm, which had remained in the family since 1850, to satisfy an affordable-housing mandate. The family rejected a multimillion-dollar offer, so Cranbury Township voted to take the land anyway. Four generations of that family were buried in the town, but government officials decided that their housing quota carried more weight than 175 years of ownership.

This abuse crosses party lines. Republicans support eminent domain when they want pipelines, border infrastructure, or corporate development. Democrats support it for affordable housing, environmental schemes, and urban redevelopment. Both sides believe private property remains yours only until the state discovers a politically favored use for it.

Jamie Dimon openly wrote in 2023 that governments, businesses, and nongovernmental organizations might need to invoke eminent domain to accelerate investments in grids, solar facilities, wind projects, and pipelines. That statement exposed the direction of policy. The political and corporate classes view private property as an inconvenience standing between them and whatever agenda they have declared urgent.

Now AI has become the latest excuse. This is not an argument against technological development. Private companies have every right to build data centers, but they should purchase the required land in a voluntary transaction. If an owner refuses to sell, the company should change the route, improve its offer, develop alternative power supplies, or build elsewhere. The word “no” is supposed to mean something in a free market.

There is no genuine property ownership when the government can determine the buyer, the price, and the date you must leave. What Americans possess under this system is conditional occupancy. You pay property taxes forever, comply with thousands of regulations, and may still be expelled when a corporation with political connections wants the land beneath your feet.

The AI companies will keep the profits. The utilities will recover their investments through rates. Politicians will hold ceremonies and boast about jobs and innovation. The displaced landowners will be handed a check calculated by strangers and told that the seizure was performed for the public good.

That is not capitalism. It is corporatism enforced by the state, and eminent domain is the weapon that makes the robbery legal.

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“A second residency is optionality. You don’t have to use it.”

~ The Dollar Collapse Playbook, 2026 Edition

This blog was made in regards to the upcoming release of the Dollar Collapse Playbook.

The cheapest move in the entire Dollar Collapse Playbook isn’t a metal, a miner, or a short. It’s paperwork.

Move 20, the second residency, buys a household something no portfolio can: the legal right to be somewhere else. Foreign medical care, a second banking jurisdiction, a place for the kids to land, all of it pre-arranged while the arranging is easy.

The price tag really does surprise some people:

The Dollar Collapse Playbook lays out the menu:

Permanent residency in a stable, low-cost country, for the price of a used Honda, maintained by a visit once every three years.

Now compare that to what the passport salesmen want for the deluxe version:

Citizenship-by-investment starts around $150,000 and climbs from there. In the Dollar Collapse Playbook: we recommend that residency deliver the most of the practical protection at a fraction of the cost, and it never asks you to explain a second passport to anyone.

A few rules keep this from going sideways.

Use a licensed immigration attorney in the target country, budget $2,000 to $5,000 for the privilege, and walk away from any “residency consultant” whose website looks like a timeshare pitch. Pick jurisdictions with stable politics and real property rights, because protection bought in an unstable country is a costume. And respect the maintenance requirements; most programs want a visit on a schedule, so pick one that fits how your family actually lives.

Who is this for? The Playbook aims it at households in the Prepared or Fortified tiers, especially ones with children or grandchildren whose options are worth widening. If the metals are bought and the accounts are consolidated, this is the next box to tick.

The case in dollars is simple. Every other form of insurance in the Playbook fluctuates with a market.

This one just sits in a drawer, valid, waiting, purchased once.

While that used Honda will depreciate. The residency won’t.

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By Martin Armstrong, Armstrong Economics

If the goal is truly to Make America Healthy Again, then the latest decision from the Environmental Protection Agency raises serious questions. According to the article you sent, the EPA has approved two new fluorinated pesticides, diflufenican and epyrifenacil, for use on some of America’s most important crops, including corn, soybeans, and wheat. Neither chemical has previously been approved for use in American agriculture.

Environmental groups argue these compounds qualify as PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” under internationally recognized scientific definitions because they can persist in the environment and eventually degrade into trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), an extremely persistent fluorinated compound found in groundwater around the world. The EPA disputes that characterization, maintaining the products do not meet its regulatory definition of PFAS and that they can be used safely according to their labels.

Diflufenican has already become controversial in Europe. Denmark banned its use in part because of concerns that it contributes to TFA contamination of groundwater, while German monitoring has detected TFA in a large percentage of tested wells. Epyrifenacil has reportedly never received approval for agricultural use within the European Union. Whether those regulatory decisions ultimately prove right or wrong, they demonstrate that this is hardly an uncontested scientific issue. Governments around the world are reaching different conclusions about the same chemicals, yet American consumers are expected to assume there is nothing to debate.

What makes this particularly troubling is the contradiction with the broader Make America Healthy Again movement. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made eliminating artificial food dyes, improving nutrition, investigating chronic disease, reforming food ingredients, and reducing Americans’ exposure to harmful chemicals central themes of his public campaign. Those are worthwhile objectives. Yet cleaning up processed foods while simultaneously allowing the introduction of new fluorinated pesticides that have never before been used on American food crops sends a mixed message. If the objective is to reduce unnecessary chemical exposure wherever possible, then many Americans will reasonably ask why entirely new fluorinated agricultural chemicals are being introduced at the same time. That contradiction is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

The broader issue is one I have discussed for years in my Agricultural Report. Food has become another battlefield. Farmers are buried under climate regulations, fertilizer restrictions, water controls, and endless bureaucratic oversight, while consumers are increasingly separated from understanding how their food is actually produced. Governments continue expanding their influence over agriculture under the banners of safety, climate, or public health. Regardless of political party, that trend never seems to reverse.

Food security has always been national security. Once confidence in the safety of the food supply begins to erode, rebuilding that trust becomes extraordinarily difficult. The debate over diflufenican and epyrifenacil is therefore much larger than two new pesticides. It reflects a growing public concern that regulators continue introducing new chemicals into the food chain while asking citizens to simply trust that everything has been thoroughly evaluated. History has taught us that blind trust in government regulators is rarely rewarded.

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By Christian Milord, The Epoch Times

Commentary

In a free society that embraces free markets and the rule of law, young people must be made aware of the glaring realities regarding the alleged “fuzzy and warm” nature of Marxist (collectivism, communism, progressivism, socialism) iterations. There are at least twelve aspects of the Marxist ideology that are clear and present dangers to democratic nations as well as undemocratic countries.

First, Marxism was founded on the stark concept of atheism. Consequently, it attempts to dismantle the Judeo-Christian faith that has been an anchor of civilization for thousands of years and helps people to navigate life’s challenges. Marxists also oppose the traditional family, which is the building block of any culture and bolsters societal bonds. On every life category, intact families are far more successful than broken families.

Next, Marxist policies encourage folks to be intellectually and physically lazy as they rely on bureaucratic government for all of their needs. This reliance generates an unearned entitlement mentality that expects others to supply the needs of those who refuse to accept personal responsibility. Minimal effort is applied to studying and working, yet the “entitled” expect to earn high salaries regardless of the effort they put forth.

Third, Marxists are quite generous with the money confiscated from job creators, but they are stingy with their own money. However, most of the money and possessions that are seized by Marxist leaders end up with their cronies and are not redistributed to the lower-income workers they claim to be helping. The hypocrisy is staggering.

Fourth, Marxist influencers compete with one another to see who the best liar is as they deceive the vulnerable who might believe promises that are too good to be true. Marxists use deception as a means to control the masses and keep them on their heels. They talk a good game about socialism as a paradise on earth yet do everything they can to turn that alleged nirvana into a hell on earth.

Fifth, Marxism is an arbitrary system built on a foundation of contradictions. It can hand out some goodies but just as easily withdraw them. Marxists believe that they can alter laws whenever they feel the urge, thus using raw power plays to confuse and divide people, and consolidate power in the hands of a few. Arbitrary laws can hinder people from advancing economically and can also create insecurity.

Sixth, for an ideology that claims it will usher in equality, Marxism certainly is fixated on economic class, color, gender, and race. Apparently, some are more equal than others. Instead of equal opportunity, Marxists favor the equity of prearranged outcomes. Many Marxist spokespersons are often educated academics who pretend victimhood and fear competition in the real world yet believe they are smarter than everyone else. They’ve learned nothing about good citizenship and wisdom, while displaying a common sense deficit. Marxists envy folks who keep their noses to the grindstone, and lash out at those who possess discipline, deferred gratification, and a healthy work ethic.

Seventh, Marxists promise freedom and security to those who will join their cause, yet wealth is stolen from others, and security only exists for those at the top of the pyramid. In other words, everyone is equally miserable under Marxism except for the jackbooted leaders who profit from the spoils acquired from their “legalized” theft. For proof, just examine the misery index of folks in China PRC, Cuba, Iran, N. Korea, and Russia.

Eighth, it’s puzzling why Marxists who reside in free societies lack the courage to move to the autocratic societies they admire. Is it because they don’t even believe the mantras they keep repeating, or do they want to have their cake and eat it, too? They denounce the blessings of free enterprise and liberty at the same time as they partake of them. Unfortunately, they have taken their blessings for granted. Do they really want to transform America into a dysfunctional nation that has constant shortages of goods and services?

Ninth, Marxism promotes the darker facets of human nature rather than its nobler strivings. Marxists turn lies into the truth and truth into lies. They oppose the arts, constructive creativity, and innovation and constantly push monolithic groupthink instead of critical thinking. In other words, Marxism is extremely boring and lacks a sense of humor.

Tenth, Marxists never learn from history and thus are doomed to repeat it, even after the carnage that’s been generated by their dystopian policies for over a century. Someone once noted that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. That’s the Marxist playbook in a nutshell.

Eleventh, Marxists glorify the vices and demonize traditional virtues even while they carry out plenty of virtue signaling. They condescendingly lecture us about upholding democracy and liberty at the same time as they attempt to erode economic freedom, educational freedom, and individual freedom.

Finally, Marxism is highly immature. Marxists rarely learn from the past and thus triple down on failure. They blame others for their own fascist behavior, which is an example of denial and projection. They demand to get what other folks have earned, which is childish and immoral. Marxists side with totalitarian entities and mob rule, while opposing the sole Middle East democracy, Israel. Most Marxists only embrace law enforcement when it is provided to protect unlawful immigrants and themselves, and when it is used to punish law-abiding folks. This is why it is imperative to vigorously oppose Marxism by all means necessary.

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By Scott Ritter, Real Scott Ritter

When I was travelling to Israel on a regular basis back in the mid- to late-1990’s as part of my duties with the United Nations, I was always struck by how closely many Israelis identified with the United States. On national holidays, many Israeli motorists would fly two little plastic flags from the windows of their cars—one the blue and white Star of David, and the other the Stars and Stripes. “We see ourselves as little America”, my Israeli host would explain when I pointed this out.

The reality was far different.

The Israelis conspired against their American counterparts behind their backs, and the US intelligence and security services viewed Israel as a threat to US national security.

I know—I was caught up in the middle of this power dynamic, and ended up being accused by the US government of spying on behalf of Israel. The charges were eventually dropped as unfounded and politically motivated, but the sentiment behind the accusations was real—a significant part of the US defense, intelligence and security establishment of the United States viewed Israel as a threat.

Because Israel was a threat.

This doesn’t mean there wasn’t collaboration and cooperation ongoing between the US and Israel—while I was in Israel, the hotels were full of CIA officers, US military officers, and State Department diplomats who were on official business.

But there was a Chinese Wall separating the US and Israel, and interactions were governed by strict protocols that kept this wall up at all times.

After I left the United Nations, I worked for a while as an on-air analyst for NBC News.

I also signed with a New York City speakers bureau, Greater Talent Network (GTN).

And it was these two experiences which exposed me to the level to which pro-Israeli interests had infiltrated every aspect of American media and information management.

I was approached repeatedly by NBC producers who would hand me their business cards—not the NBC ones, but rather their AIPAC cards (the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, a literal front for the Israeli government.)

GTN networked me directly with AIPAC, as well as its affiliate entities that had taken root in American academia and the think tank industry.

Through these networks, I was brought into a secretive world of backroom connectivity with the US Congress, where AIPAC called the shots for influential Senators and Congressional Representatives, and Senate and House staffers openly collaborated with employees of various US government agencies to set policy.

I was offered a great deal of money by Paul Wolfowitz, who at the time of the pitch was the Dean of the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), if I would join the team.

All I had to do was get onboard with the notion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

I declined Wolfowitz’s offer, and walked away from the AIPAC cabal.

Unfortunately America’s elected representatives have not shown such moral clarity or loyalty to the Republic they ostensibly serve.

We live in an age where the Israeli Prime Minister openly brags about having bought the US Congress.

Where AIPAC brags about spending $100 million to accomplish just that.

Where pro-Israeli operatives spent $30 million to evict Thomas Massie from the US Congress because he dared challenge the surrender of American sovereignty to Israel.

Where the US Secretary of State has openly declared that criticism of Israel is grounds for being denied a visa into the United States.

Where Israeli politicians openly advocate for the suppression of free speech in America.

And where the Chinese Wall that separated US and Israeli interests is being torn down by a compliant Congress, all the while the mainstream media, which long ago surrendered its independence and integrity to Israeli interests, remains silent.

The surrender document that signals the capitulation of the Constitutional Republic formerly known as the United States of America to a new entity which could more accurately be called the United States of Israel is the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), in particular Section 219 of the House version, and Section 1217 of the Senate’s version.

Section 219/1217 directs the Secretary of Defense to designate an Executive Agent (EA) to expand and accelerate deeper integration of Israel into US institutions. The EA authority would take precedence over the authority of the other DoD Component heads per DOD Instruction 5101.01, meaning that the EA would be able to overrule determinations by other DOD agencies such as the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA) on Israeli access to US technology. This new EA would end direct Congressional oversight with supervision by the Secretary of Defense. There would be no Congressional confirmation or ability for removal of an executive agent by Congress.

In short, it is the surrendering of the constitutional duties of Congress to a politically appointment agent of the Executive branch of government.

This is not what the founding fathers had in mind when they wrote the Constitution.

Section 2191217 integrates American and Israeli research and development programs in a way which makes the United States dependent on Israel’s provision of specific technologies, thereby granting Israel a significant amount of leverage over future American policy and infrastructure, entangling defense supply chains of Israel and the United States across government, private and academic sectors, blurring the lines of territorial integrity and political sovereignty.

Section 219/1217 targets defense related procurement and acquisition processes so that it will be impossible for future Administrations to separate Israeli technologies or agreements from major defense procurement programs, holding DOD Program Executive Offices and Program Managers hostage to the inclusion of Israeli-origin technologies in US systems. These procedures make moot current “Buy-America” provisions, and give Israeli companies access to intellectual property for weapons systems they are directly competing against.

Section 2191217 grants the EA the authority to re-allocate the funding and focus of the Defense Department by prioritizing the integration of Israel into the US’ national defense structures. It is literally subordinating the totality of the most sensitive aspects of US defense to Israel, outside the purview of Congressional oversight.

At a time when the majority of the American people are waking up to the horrific crimes committed by Israel against the people of Palestine, and the role played by Israel in getting America involved in permanent wars in the Middle East, Section 219/1217 will permanently tie the United States to Israel, making the US Department of Defense and, by extension, all of the American people, complicit in these crimes.

The Greater Israeli Project, which seeks the territorial expansion of the Israeli State in the Middle East at the expense of Israel’s neighbors, is floundering.

Israel itself is going through an existential crisis because of its permanent state of war.

I have previously written that the relationship between Israel and the United States is like that of a parasite to its host.

Section 219/1217 would codify this status as law.

And in doing so, destroy the Constitutional Republic.

Congress has specific duties and responsibilities demanded of it by the Constitution.

Surrendering these responsibilities to a foreign nation is not one of these duties.

If Section 219/1217 becomes law, Israel will have permanently attached itself to the American enterprise.

Right now, we have a Congress which has considered criminalizing and criticism of Israel.

This, or course, is an affront to the very notion of free speech.

By making Israeli security and US security indistinguishable, as would happen if Section 219/1217 becomes law, the inevitability of the criminalization of speech critical of Israel is assured.

The 2027 NDAA is America’s last stand.

Remove Section 2191217, and we have a chance at survival.

Turn Section 219/1217 into law, and we have lost the Republic.

I swore to defend the United States of America, a Constitutional Republic.

I will never serve the United States of Israel.

And neither should anyone who calls themselves an American.

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Etienne Note: We covered the fact that the US has used all its defensive missiles in this pointless war for Isreal in last week’s Five Meme Friday newsletter including an infographic I created showing how Trump is personally invested in the missile manufacturers profiting from shooting $30,000 drones with $15,000,000 missiles. This story is about the US using up its offensive missiles as well and hollowing out the military on a foreign war based on lies about Iran’s non-existent nuclear program. Sure smells like organized crime enrichment to me.

By Reuters, Military Times

The U.S. Army has used up much of its stockpile of highly accurate long-range missiles during America’s five-month war with Iran, according to three people familiar with the data, raising concerns about the military’s readiness for future conflicts.

The missiles are principally the Army’s surface-to-surface weapons, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). The U.S. has used “virtually all” of these weapons, according to two of the sources.

The degree to which the military is running out of ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles has not been previously reported.

The long-range munitions are an important part of the military’s arsenal, allowing accurate strikes from a safe distance. U.S.-supplied ATACMS have played a key role in the war in Ukraine, allowing Ukrainian forces to attack targets inside Russia. The PrSM is a newer, more advanced generation that will replace the ATACMS, which have a shorter range.

Analysts say such weapons — which cost over $1 million each — would also be important in any conflict with China.

The sources declined to say how many of each munition the U.S. had left.

President Donald Trump launched the Iran war jointly with Israel in February, predicting that the conflict would last a short time.

But as the war drags on, the three people familiar with the matter expressed worry that the falling missile supplies could limit the U.S. ability to deter adversaries, including Russia and China.

A fourth person familiar with the matter said that while Central Command — which oversees U.S. forces in the Middle East — has nearly used up the land-based missiles it had before the war began, it has been able to reload from U.S. military supplies elsewhere in the world.

The sources interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Asked for comment on the stockpile data, the White House issued a statement from Trump, saying the U.S. had “far more munitions than anyone in the world” and “far more than we need.”

“Our defense companies are, at this moment, making more munitions than they have ever made before, in addition to expanding their plants and equipment at record levels,” Trump said.

Analysts agree that certain munitions, including artillery shells and several types of missiles, are being produced at record levels but caution that supplies might far short of what is needed for a prolonged war.

Lockheed Martin, which makes the ATACMs and PrSMs, along with the anti-ballistic missile THAAD system, did not immediately respond to questions about Trump’s statements or about supply levels.

Raytheon, which makes Tomahawk missiles and Patriot interceptors, two important U.S. weapons, also did not immediately respond.

Responding to a request for comment, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said: “America’s military is the most powerful in the world and has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the President’s choosing. We have executed multiple successful operations across combatant commands while ensuring the U.S. military possesses a deep arsenal of capabilities to protect our people and our interests.”

The supply figures have circulated inside the federal government over the last week during tense conversations inside the Trump administration about how much longer the U.S. can continue striking Iran without drawing down the stockpile to levels that would limit the military’s ability to respond to crises elsewhere.Lockheed Martin, which makes the ATACMs and PrSMs, along with the anti-ballistic missile THAAD system, did not immediately respond to questions about Trump’s statements or about supply levels.

Raytheon, which makes Tomahawk missiles and Patriot interceptors, two important U.S. weapons, also did not immediately respond.

Responding to a request for comment, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said: “America’s military is the most powerful in the world and has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the President’s choosing. We have executed multiple successful operations across combatant commands while ensuring the U.S. military possesses a deep arsenal of capabilities to protect our people and our interests.”

The supply figures have circulated inside the federal government over the last week during tense conversations inside the Trump administration about how much longer the U.S. can continue striking Iran without drawing down the stockpile to levels that would limit the military’s ability to respond to crises elsewhere.

WARNINGS OVER WEAPONS SUPPLIES

One of the sources said the drawdown of the ATACMS and PrSM stockpiles reflected a decision by the Trump administration to avoid riskier ways of attacking Iranian targets, such as by using piloted aircraft to drop bombs.

Because these weapons allow the military to attack targets from a distance, analysts say they would be valuable in a war against an adversary with strong air defenses, such as China.

They have been used to strike targets inside Iran, according to a March report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

According to the report, PrSM stockpiles were low to start with, since it is a relatively new munition, but the U.S. military has ordered a large number of them for 2027. The Army has said that ATACMS are being phased out and that production is shifting to the newer PrSM missiles.

Military leaders have for weeks warned the president that stockpiles of defensive weapons — including Patriot interceptors, which are effective against ballistic missiles — were dwindling, said two of the sources.

Last week, several media outlets reported Trump had decided not to launch another massive offensive inside Iran in part because his military advisers had warned about the U.S. stockpile.

A U.S. official disputed those accounts, saying Trump chose not to move forward with another attack because of pressure from Gulf states.

The Middle East conflict has sparked intense debate about Trump’s authority to prosecute hostilities against Iran without congressional authorization. No request for a declaration of war or an authorization to use military force has been submitted to Congress.

DEFENSIVE WEAPON STOCKS ARE ALSO DIMINISHED

Last week, CSIS published a report estimating that between February and July about 65% of Patriot interceptors had been expended and that the number of THAAD ballistic missile interceptors in U.S. stockpiles was at least 38% lower than at the start of the war.

Patriots and THAADs are systems that detect and destroy incoming missiles and are among the most effective in the country’s arsenal.

While Reuters has not seen the supply figures, those numbers match internal U.S. data, two of the sources said.

The U.S. also burned through a little less than half of its global supply of Tomahawk cruise missiles, which are generally launched from ships, since the start of the war, one of the sources said.

Reuters could not independently verify that number.

The Tomahawk is a Navy weapon, launched from destroyers, cruisers and submarines, and has long served as the sea service’s principal means of striking heavily defended targets without risking pilots.

Raytheon, a unit of RTX, has reached a tentative multi-year agreement with the Pentagon aimed at boosting Tomahawk production, alongside increases in other munitions, as Washington races to rebuild stockpiles.

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Etienne Note: This article also appears in “Government”, Media and Academia Criminality Exposed, A digest of HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of articles exposing and suggesting inter-generational organized crime’s control of the “Government,” Media and Academia by the Art of Liberty Foundation. You can view the other articles or subscribe on Telegram: https://t.me/Government_Scams

By Hannah Critchfield and Shane Shifflett, The Wall Street Journal

Tired_Thumb is far from alone.

In recent months, ICE has deployed a round-the-clock digital dragnet to scour the public internet, from Facebook to Instagram to X, for speech that could endanger the agency's mission. The government has paid millions to private contractors to surface everything from potential threats to agents to activities that could disrupt ICE's operations, according to federal documents, contractors and former Homeland Security Investigations agents.

The program has ensnared U.S. citizens and activist groups that alert community members about ICE activity. Contractors prepare daily reports and dossiers on threat actors, identifying the poster's name, location, date of birth, workplace, social security number, vehicle registration, and criminal history when possible. To unmask anonymous online critics, DHS has sent hundreds of subpoenas to social media companies, according to people familiar with the matter. Its agents have tracked down Americans at work and on the road, asking them to sign letters acknowledging their online speech about ICE may be a crime. DHS says it is trying to protect its agents and their families from coordinated campaigns of violence that have fueled an 8,000 percent increase in death threats since Trump took office. But civil rights lawyers and former DHS staffers say the approach has swept up people expressing opinions that are protected by the First Amendment.

Additional context: origins, scope, and documented impact

The current surveillance effort builds on infrastructure ICE has used since at least 2020, when the agency first contracted with Giant Oak, a firm retained for social-media monitoring during both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. What has expanded under the current program is the depth of profiling involved: contractors are now instructed to assess a poster’s “proclivity for violence” using behavioral-science methods and psychological profiles, aided by facial-recognition tools that can match a photo to a person’s broader online footprint and offline identity — including, according to procurement documents, family ties and relationship networks.

Independent reviews of ICE’s monitoring tools have found the dragnet extends across more than 200 websites, ranging from mainstream platforms to niche online communities — including sites catering to hobbyists, car owners, and dating-app users. Notably, the list also includes Truth Social and Rumble, platforms generally associated with the president’s own political base, suggesting the program’s reach may extend beyond its stated focus on foreign nationals or undocumented immigrants to encompass U.S. citizens more broadly.

Civil-liberties advocates have raised concerns that go beyond the immigrant community the agency says it is focused on protecting. Immigration-rights organizer Cinthya Rodriguez, with the advocacy group Mijente, has argued that assigning automated “sentiment” judgments to people’s online speech fits into a longer pattern of mass surveillance and retaliation against activists. Separately, privacy attorneys have questioned whether ICE is obtaining judicial warrants before deploying these tools, framing the practice as a First Amendment concern given how much political organizing and personal communication now takes place over social media and personal devices.

NPR’s ongoing reporting has documented individual cases of Americans swept into this system — people who monitored ICE activity in their communities and were later confronted by agents who identified them by name and home address, illustrating how the “dossier” process plays out in practice for ordinary citizens rather than only organized threat actors.

DHS has defended the program as a necessary response to a documented surge in violence against its personnel, and has said its efforts are focused on protecting agents and their families rather than suppressing lawful speech. Civil rights lawyers and several former DHS staffers, however, maintain that the practical effect has been to sweep up constitutionally protected expression alongside genuine threats.

Sources:

• Truthout, “Report: ICE Is Expanding Surveillance of Its Critics on Social Media.”

• The Intercept, “ICE Wants to Know if You’re Posting Negative Things About It Online.”

• Project Censored, “ICE Solicits Social Media Surveillance Contracts to Identify Critics.”

• NPR, “What it’s like to get caught in ICE’s surveillance web,” Consider This, March 2026.

• AOL/Washington Post, “ICE Is Mounting a Mass Surveillance Campaign on American Citizens.”

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By David Moore, Sludge

Summary

The pro-Israel group's PAC and super PAC have poured $104.3 million into the midterms, including more than $30.6 million in Michigan's Democratic Senate primary, the most it has ever spent on a single race.

For the second cycle in a row, AIPAC has surpassed $100 million in federal election spending, according to a Sludge review of campaign finance records.

As recently as 2021, AIPAC had never directly donated to a federal candidate—its PAC made its first donations in January 2022, and that same month it formed its own super PAC. By the 2024 cycle, AIPAC’s nine-figure outlays in elections marked a dramatic increase in its spending for the House and Senate lawmakers who approve billions of dollars in economic and military aid packages for Israel. Now, about three months before Election Day, AIPAC is cementing its status as one of the largest spenders on congressional elections.

The spending comes as a growing number of congressional Democrats are challenging unconditional military aid to Israel, recently casting votes to restrict or condition the flow of U.S. weapons as Israel continues its strikes in Gaza and Lebanon.

AIPAC’s PAC and super PAC, the United Democracy Project (UDP), have combined for more than $104.3 million in political spending so far in the 2026 cycle, according to a review of FEC data. That figure does not include spending to influence voters by allied super PACs like Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) or by a sprawling network of pop-up super PACs that were seeded by UDP or DMFI.

The $104.3 million figure is likely to swell before the midterms are through. As of the end of June, UDP had another $80 million on hand to spend on elections, according to its most recent FEC filing, and AIPAC PAC is likely to continue funneling contributions to lawmakers totaling in the millions of dollars per month.

The nine-figure total includes the most AIPAC has ever spent on a single race: the Aug. 4 Michigan Senate Democratic primary, where UDP has spent $30.6 million supporting Rep. Haley Stevens and opposing Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

AIPAC has notched wins recently on Capitol Hill. In addition to continuing billions of dollars in military aid, last month the U.S. House passed a National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2027 that includes a provision expanding U.S.–Israeli defense cooperation, language that AIPAC applauded.

Additional context: the Michigan Senate primary spending breakdown

According to Al Jazeera’s review of FEC records, AIPAC’s United Democracy Project has spent slightly more than the Sludge figure once rounding is accounted for — $30,638,639.63 as of early August — confirming it as the largest single-race investment in the group’s history. But UDP’s spending is only part of the picture: a dark-money nonprofit called the Center for Democratic Priorities has independently spent about $6.5 million on ads supporting Rep. Haley Stevens, pushing total outside spending backing her past $60 million. Because it operates as a nonprofit rather than a PAC, the Center for Democratic Priorities is not required to disclose its donors to the FEC, making its funding sources untraceable through public filings.

Beyond UDP and the Center for Democratic Priorities, Politics Today identifies several of the individual mega-donors behind the broader pro-Stevens financial network: hedge fund manager Paul Singer, businessman Robert Kraft, investor Marc Rowan, and entertainment executive Haim Saban. Additional money has flowed through a cluster of newly formed committees — including A Stronger Michigan (backed primarily by the nonprofit Center Forward), Michigan Forward 2026, Center Forward Committee, and Unite to Win — several of which have funding sources that are not fully disclosed under current U.S. campaign-finance rules.

The financial imbalance in the race is stark. Stevens’ own campaign spent just $12,000 on advertising through early July before ramping up to roughly $1 million, while outside groups poured close to $50 million into boosting her candidacy — nearly 50 times her own campaign’s ad spending. Her opponent, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, spent about $3.2 million from his own campaign account, supplemented by only around $1 million in outside spending, and has instead leaned on a grassroots operation of more than 10,000 volunteers statewide (compared to the “hundreds” Stevens’ campaign says it has recruited).

The spending has become a central campaign issue. At a rally in Dearborn, Michigan state legislator Alabas Farhat told supporters they would make AIPAC “burn” millions by electing El-Sayed, while Sen. Bernie Sanders — campaigning alongside El-Sayed in Detroit, Lansing, and Grand Rapids — went further, telling supporters Stevens was “nothing more than an employee of these billionaires.” Stevens has responded by saying she supports “comprehensive campaign finance reform,” but has largely avoided directly addressing AIPAC’s role in her campaign. El-Sayed, for his part, has framed the race as a contest of “the many versus the money.” Michigan political strategist Adrian Hemond offered a more skeptical read on the spending’s electoral impact, suggesting that while Democratic primary voters clearly don’t favor AIPAC, the group’s involvement doesn’t appear to be registering as a decisive issue for most voters.

The race is unfolding against a backdrop of growing intraparty division over Israel policy: earlier this month, 103 House Democrats voted unsuccessfully to block $3.3 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel — described by observers as the clearest sign yet of a widening rift within the party.

Sources:

• Al Jazeera, “How much has AIPAC spent against Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed? And why?” August 2, 2026.

• ABC News/AP, “AIPAC has spent a record amount on Michigan’s Senate primary, the biggest test of its influence yet.”

• Politics Today, “AIPAC Spending Dominates Michigan Senate Campaign Race.”

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By Mal,Whatfinger News

Glenn Beck just laid it bare, and every American who still believes in free enterprise should pay attention.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist darling of the DSA, isn’t building grocery stores. He is a radical Marxist Democrat, member of the DSA who plans on destroying all freedom in the U.S. He’s building a taxpayer-funded wrecking ball aimed straight at private business. The plan: spend at least $70 million of other people’s money to open five government-run grocery stores — one in each borough — that will deliberately sell core staples at 30% below market prices. These stores won’t pay rent. They won’t pay property taxes. And they won’t care if they lose money hand over fist. They can do this with many industries under the banner of their fake Socialism designed to destroy all business and make as many people as poor as possible, so they scream for Marxism

Beck’s math is brutal and correct. The average American grocery store operates on razor-thin margins of about 1–2 cents of profit on the dollar. Mamdani’s city stores are projected to lose roughly 28 cents on every single dollar they ring up. How do you compete with that if you’re a family-owned bodega or independent grocer who actually has to make payroll, pay rent, and turn a profit to survive?

You don’t.

A key Mamdani ally said the quiet part out loud when asked about the bodega owners who will be wiped out: “If one publicly owned grocery store is bringing prices down enough to put a man out of business, then maybe he shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place.”

That’s not compassion. That’s the pure ideology of Democratic Socialism — the American rebrand of the same Marxist impulse that has produced empty shelves, rationing, and black markets everywhere it’s been tried. The government doesn’t need to nationalize the entire industry overnight. It just needs to subsidize its own competitors until the private ones go bankrupt. Then the state becomes the only game in town.

This is textbook economic destruction dressed up as “affordability.” New Yorkers already face some of the highest grocery prices in the country. Instead of cutting the taxes, regulations, and crime that drive those costs, Mamdani and his fellow travelers in the Democratic Socialists of America prefer the command-economy solution: create state-backed stores that can lose money indefinitely because the losses are socialized onto every taxpayer in the city.

We’ve seen this movie before. Kansas City poured nearly $18 million into a publicly backed grocery store that still lost nearly $900,000 in a single year, suffered empty shelves, rampant theft, and eventually closed. Communist China and the old Soviet system ran the same “people’s stores.” The result was always the same: shortages, ration tickets, and long lines while the political class ate well. Venezuela tried it too. The shelves went bare and the people starved.

Mamdani’s version comes with better branding and a 30% discount promise on produce, meat, seafood, dairy, and bread. Private operators will supposedly run the stores under city price controls. The first locations are planned for the South Bronx and East Harlem, with openings targeted for 2027. But the core principle remains unchanged: the state will compete against its own citizens using money forcibly taken from those same citizens, and it will keep competing until the private sector is driven out.

This is not “helping working families.” This is the systematic replacement of voluntary exchange with political control over the food supply. Once the bodegas and independent markets are gone, New Yorkers will be left with whatever the city bureaucracy decides to stock, at whatever quality it decides is good enough, funded by whatever new taxes or deficits the politicians demand next.

Whatfinger News and MAGA readers understand the pattern. The same people who spent years calling capitalism the enemy are now using the power of government to prove that private business cannot survive when forced to compete against a rival that never has to balance its books. The goal is not cheaper groceries long-term. The goal is dependency and control.

Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists are not hiding their ideology. They are simply testing how much of it they can impose on the largest city in America before the rest of the country notices. The bodega owners getting crushed are the canaries in the coal mine. If this model succeeds in New York, every blue city will try the same playbook.

Free markets built the most abundant food supply in human history. Government-run stores have a perfect record of producing the opposite. New York is about to run the experiment again — with your money on the line and the small business owners of the city as the first casualties. Never forget, the Democrats are openly saying they will do this nationwide. These people are just plain evil, and must be stopped. Unfortunately, with voting laws the way they are in Marxist controlled states and cities like NYC, it is impossible to defeat them at the ballot box. They can always mail in, find or invent as many votes as they need. Which means, a Marxist Confederacy of cities and states is now forming in the U.S. backed by voter fraud and your tax dollars. Only Federal action can stop it, or a real revolution.

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Middle East regional media has reported a huge uptick in Israeli military attacks in the Gaza Strip since President Trump announced a “historic” agreement which Hamas finally signed on to.

The agreement would result in a phased complete disarmament of Hamas and the handing over of governance to newly proposed National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) - a body designed to replace both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

However, fighting has persisted, with Al Jazeera reporting that at least 19 Palestinians killed on Saturday in Israeli attacks and that the total deal toll from the weekend is now 26 people, including women and children.

Israel continues to express skepticism in the face of Washington’s recent optimism:

Despite Hamas agreeing to a phased disarmament, Israel’s government says it has “serious security concerns” about the plan, and there has been strong resistance from Israeli politicians to the deal.

The continued bombardment of Gaza, contributing to Israel’s continued breaches of October’s “ceasefire” agreement, will likely threaten Trump’s peace plan and exacerbate the already dire humanitarian situation for Palestinians in the enclave.

Reuters had on Sunday reported an entire day of fresh IDF bombardment on Gaza.

“Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza for a second straight day on Sunday, killing at least 18 Palestinians, medics said, ​despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement of a breakthrough in efforts to implement last year’s ceasefire agreement,” Reuters wrote.

“From dawn, Israeli warplanes hit Gaza City in the north, the central city of Deir ‌al-Balah and the southern area of Khan Younis, causing the biggest daily death toll in weeks, according to Palestinian health officials,” it added.

Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen issued the Netanyahu government’s view on Sunday: “In the deal we signed with the United States, our stance is that Hamas must be dismantled. This is the first thing ⁠that must happen.”

Cohen expressed that Israeli is “very skeptical” that Hamas would actually disarm. And PM Netanyahu’s office said: “The most important concern for Israel is that nothing can happen ​before Hamas completely and truly disarms.”c

So while the US and regional leaders are busy celebrating and hailing the plan, the proverbial devil will be in the details and in the process - and needless to say a lot could go wrong.

On pro-Palestinian advocate and author worries that Gaza will continue to be destroyed, but that international coverage and cameras have in effect moved on: “There was a time when every explosion in Gaza flashed across my phone – horrible images of children being pulled from rubble, medical workers trying to help patients as the hospital itself gets bombed, and families howling in grief as Israeli bombs obliterated entire Palestinian lineages,” Vijay Prashad observes.

Prashad adds: “Israel’s attacks continue as families flee from one temporary shelter to another and children search through shattered concrete for fragments of lives they once knew. But the world’s attention has shifted elsewhere as the genocide has become routine. We have become comfortably numb.”

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Etienne Note: We think it is the banks on top using Freemasonry as a front group and coordinating network. We think the lodge system was captured by inter-generational organized crime to project power globally through masonry whose members were the 1^st to consolidate power in local communities by coordinating their members, sworn to secrecy and actively networking to control local political networks, the Sheriff, and other power blocks. The banks are creating the fiat paper tickets that allow them to buy up and monopolize the companies illustrated in this analysis. The asset managers like Blackrock, State Street and Vanguard obscure the ownership of companies stolen through Fractional Reserve Banking that I explain in my new book: The Biggest Theft in Human History at Greatest-Theft.com

By Prof. Fred, Scientific Progress

https://aidatacentermap.org/map

Context: 4 takeouts

1. There’s no way to financially justify the literally hundreds of billions per year “invested” (burned) on AI data centers, except with funding from the US/UK/EU freemasonic military industrial complex:

Power needs power: electrical, computing and cell power are the bricks of the digital prison

Prof. Fred Nazar

·

3 de ene

Context

Read full story

2. Another evidence: they get free land without any environmental and housing restrictions, due to military “national interest”.

• Trump’s Executive Order mandates that the Departments of Defense, Energy, and Interior make federal lands available for data center development.

• It instructs federal agencies to expand the use of “categorical exclusions” under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and accelerate permitting under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act (CWA).

• Brownfield Conversion: The order prioritizes repurposing closed military, nuclear, and Superfund sites—such as redeveloping Cold War-era facilities in Kentucky and Ohio—into AI data centers, sidestepping standard zoning battles.

• The EPA issued guidance clarifying that off-grid “islanded” power facilities (like on-site natural gas plants built for data centers) do not trigger specific Clean Air Act permitting bottlenecks.

• Military branches are actively leasing unused base land to private hyperscalers, with major projects underway at locations like Fort Bliss (Texas) and Dugway Proving Ground (Utah).

• By shifting development to secure federal installations, hyperscalers bypass local zoning boards and housing restriction hurdles.

Obviously, the freemasonic funded “green” organizations don’t complain against the massive water and energy usage, EMF smog, noise, etc.

3. It’s clear that they are using the data centers for their global government digi-tatorship, AI is an essential piece in:

a) controlling all digital transactions (CBDCs; tokenization of nature) and

b) profiling each person by spying on every single digital interaction in the world.

4. Another evidence of a freemasonic move is that, most money (either as investment or income) comes from freemason-controlled government agencies and corporations , yet the ownership is privatized to the usual suspects:

True-holders

As of Apr 3, 2025 ( it’s easy to update with the footnotes):

Note: stakes are not equal to % of ownership if there shares have different voting rights.

Microsoft

Vanguard 17%, Blackrock 8%, Fidelity 6%, State Street 4%, Price (T.Rowe) 2%, JPMORGAN 2%, Morgan Stanley 2%, NORGES BANK 1%, Northern Trust Corporation 1%. ¹.

Apple

Vanguard 17%, Blackrock 7%, Fidelity 5%, State Street 4%, Berkshire Hathaway 2%², Morgan Stanley 2%, Price (T.Rowe) 1%, NORGES BANK 1%, JPMORGAN 1%. ³

Amazon

Vanguard 14%, Blackrock 8%, Fidelity 7%, State Street 4%, Price (T.Rowe) 2%, JPMORGAN 2%, Morgan Stanley2%, NORGES BANK 1%, Northern Trust Corporation 1%.⁴

Google (DeepMind/Gemini, Alphabet’s GOOG ticker, a demon’s name)

Vanguard 14%, Blackrock 7%, Fidelity 4%, State Street 3%, JPMORGAN 2%, Capital International Investors 2%, Price (T.Rowe) 1%, Morgan Stanley 1%, Northern Trust Corporation 1%. ⁵

Facebook (META)

Vanguard 16%, Fidelity 11%, Blackrock 8%, State Street 4%, JPMORGAN 2%, Price (T.Rowe) 2%, Capital World Investors 2%, Capital Research Global Investors 2%, Morgan Stanley 2%. ⁶

Twitter (x.AI, Grok)

2025. Elon Musk’s AI firm xAI purchased X (formerly Twitter for $45 billion, which he had bought for $44 in 2022) for “data, models, compute, distribution and talent”, yet unspoken, for the future user engagement and user data “to train or inform AI outputs”. Musk’s latest step in building “an all-encompassing everything app.”⁷

By Nov 2024, Musk had 42% of X and 54% of xAI.⁸ The Banks involved in loaning the Twitter buy-out were: Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, Mitsubishi UFJ, Mizuho, BNP Paribas, and Societe Generale. Investors were Larry Ellison (Oracle, with 1 billion), Qatar Holding and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.⁹

xAI was funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and Tribe Capital.¹⁰

Who owns the owners?

Blackrock

Vanguard 15%, Blackrock 6%, State Street 4%, Charles Schwab 4%, Fidelity 3%, Temasek 3%, Bank of America 3%, Morgan Stanley 3%, Capital World Investors 3%, Capital Research Global Investors 2%. ¹¹

State Street

Vanguard 20%, Blackrock 9%, Fidelity 5%, State Street 5%, Dodge & Cox 5%, Harris 3%, Invesco 3%, JPMORGAN 2%. ¹²

This is insane! Vanguard has 14% of Amazon but it’s voting powers are much higher if Vanguard colludes with other investment firms in the voting:

For example, if together they control Blackrock under Vanguard, then Vaguard’s 15% in Blackrock and Blackrock 8% of Amazon, means that Vanguard controls 1% more voting power (15% x 8%).

Having Vanguard 20% of State Street, and State Street 4% of Amazon, then Vanguard has 1.2% more (20% x 4%).

And so forth, but in addition, Blackrock has 9% of State Street, so 9% times 4%, then there’s 0.3% more votes managed by the fund syndicate, and so forth, in a never ending matrix involving thousands of funds:

JPMORGAN

Vanguard 18%, Blackrock 9%, State Street 7%, Fidelity 5%, Morgan Stanley 2%, Bank of America 2%, NORGES BANK 1%, Northern Trust Corporation 1%, Capital International Investors 1%. ¹³

Bank of America

Vanguard 16%, Berkshire Hathaway 9%, Blackrock 8%, Fidelity 6%, State Street 6%, JPMORGAN 3%, Morgan Stanley 2%, Price (T.Rowe) 2%, NORGES BANK 2%. ¹⁴

Northern Trust Corporation

Vanguard 21%. Fidelity 14%, Blackrock 9%, State Street 6%, Massachusetts Financial Services 4%, Primecap 3%, Northern Trust Corporation¹⁵ 3%, Goldman Sachs 3%. ¹⁶

Note: iShares is Blackrock, FMR and Geode¹⁷ are Fidelity¹⁸, SPDR is State Street¹⁹, and Growth Fund of America, is managed by Capital Research and Management Company (CRMC), is owned by Capital Group, which is home to American Funds, a large mutual fund family.

Masonic funds, especially ETF, play as dummy shareholders²⁰ but are in fact outsmarting the real owners by voting for their own masonic interests.

Objections

Vanguard is unique in that it is owned by its own funds, which in turn are owned by Vanguard’s fund shareholders, meaning the investors are the owners of the firm. ²¹ There’s no way to know who are the masonic institutional and personal shareholders investing in Vanguard!

Fidelity is a private corporation where the grand daughter of the founder has 24% but the majority is in institutional hands.

By 2021, Mark Zuckerberg had a controlling interest of Facebook: according to the proxy statement, Zuckerberg owns about 360 million Class B shares. He also maintains control on voting for another 32 million with a total voting power of 57.7%.²² Yet his voting power might have been diluted with further investments, especially because of the need to develop AI.

Likewise, in Alphabet (GOOG ticker because it’s the parent of Google), masons Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt add a controlling interest of over 60% of the company’s B voting shares that carry 10 votes per share. In contrast, Alphabet Class A shares have only one vote per share, while the company’s Class C shares have no voting rights. ²³ This means that the two founders, don’t reach 51%.

Does Elon Musk has a controlling interest in all of his companies? We don’t know!

In the case of a founder controlling interest, what is the power of the masonic investing organizations?

1. All of the above founders are due-obeying masons. So it doesn’t matter, sooner or later, other masons take full control.

2. If the founders die, their heirs can’t reach an automatic controlling interest. Still, the founders make provisions on how their state is going to be distributed, mostly given back to mason organizations such as the Giving Pledge. The classic example is how masons Bill Gates and Warren Buffet deliberately lost the controlling interest of Microsoft returning the money to masonic mafia through the Giving Pledge.

3. Even if the mason founder has a controlling interest, the role of the masonic funds are:

• To fund and take part in the rigged upward valuation and profits.

• To gain from money-pumping and laundering.

• To sit on the board, check that everything is going as planned and inform the higher authority.

• To put pressure in case of disobedience.

• To get insider intel which is used in making illegal insider profits when manipulating the market.

• To legally become the owner of a spin-off.

• To get first rights in case of an investment opportunity.

Conclusion

To control a corporation, all you need is to divide share-ownership by listing it in the stock exchange and adding requirements and costs to those with high stakes, while keeping a minimum distributed controlling interest. So if you add up all the funds they control, they only need about 30% to control the board. But once we understand that the funds themselves are atomized, and that they only need 10% to control them, it means that they’d only need 3% (30% x 10%) to control a major listed multinational, even less if we look for shares with more voting rights.

Control. Not ownership. That’s the key to understand how they rule the world without having to purchase 100% of it, which would fire all the red alerts, and getting in trouble for breaking the law, for example:

• Anti-trust laws, allegedly supervised by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division (the two primary US entities controlling collusive or anti-competitive behavior).

• Racketeering laws, like the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, allegedly supervised by:

  • DOJ Organized Crime and Gang Section

  • IRS-CI (IRS Criminal Investigation) for money laundering, tax evasion, and illicit financial structures

  • ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) for weapons trafficking and violent crimes

  • DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) for drug cartels

  • DOL (Department of Labor) for labor racketeering and union corruption

Who controls those who control? The miriad of federal and state control agencies are controlled by them. Proof? They systematically break the law and absolutely nothing happens to them. They are the real untouchables.

Just as in the Truman Show, you are the star of a horror movie without even knowing it! They do whatever they want with us: they even got away with locking the world down for a year without any valid scientific reason and no one went to jail, despite it killed millions due to lack of access to cancer and heart diagnosis and treatment, blocking of COVID cures, emotional and economic chocking to death ... not counting those dead because of “the remedy worse than the disease” (as planned): haccines!

Just as with Big Tech corporations, competing AIs are not really competing. It’s a masonic land-rush, a gentlemen’s game (though not so gentle considering minor skirmishes like attracting employees from one another). Yet, no matter who wins more market share, all AIs end up rigged, following the propaganda and anti-narrative censorship by the mason controllers. Also, some AIs will eventually merge.

Masons are masters in disguising ownership so that people wouldn’t find out that the top billionaires are not Musk or Gates, who are just frontmen, but people hiding under the umbrella of thousands of intertwined corporations in a very complex cross-investing matrix.

Are they getting away with breaking the law?

• Shareholder agreements²⁴ are legal and enforceable as they are private, legally binding contracts between a company’s shareholders, and sometimes the company itself, governed by contract law.²⁵ Yet, there’s generally no legal requirement for shareholders to publicly report shareholders’ agreements, because they are considered private contracts between shareholders.²⁶

• There’s no country in the world where shareholder agreements are compelled to be disclosed in the proxy statement²⁷, which the US SEC requires ahead of an annual meeting (includes new board of director nominees, proposed executive compensation, and any other issues to vote). Don’t confuse with proxy vote, in which a shareholder agrees that another person can vote on behalf of the shareholder.

• Shareholder agreements can raise antitrust concerns if they involve competitors and restrict competition, especially regarding price-fixing, market allocation, or bid-rigging, but are generally not a problem if they do not involve competitors.

• Yet, masons were able to get away with it, for example, with the excuse that collusion was for the greater good under ESG. ²⁸

• In many countries, when a shareholder of a public company²⁹ has over 5%, he is compelled to publicly report this “disclosure of interest” (to the SEC in the USA³⁰). This is overriden with hidden colluded ownership. They are not compelled to inform the shareholder masonic agreements, which is not even in writing.

• In a listed corporation, a “controlling interest” refers to ownership or control of enough voting shares (typically over 50%) to exert decisive influence on the company’s management and direction.

Yet, when shareholders are atomized, most don’t show up at the assembly, so masons control a listed corporation with even a low 20% of voting stock, thus making it a puppet:

a) to the woke-DEI-masonic agenda using everyone’s money

b) filling all top positions with masons (there’s no such thing as involuntary unemployment in masonry)

c) creating fake jobs

d) skimming the company through generous stock options to the mason directors and managers, no-bid or tailored contracts for masonic subcontractors, etc.

• Shareholder agreements are not compelled to be publicly disclosed, even if they mean creating a controlling interest.

• Under masonic blood-oath due-obedience and under death threats for disclosing secrets, it must be presumed that being a mason officer in a listed corporation means a hidden shareholder agreement and a violation of anti-trust and fair-competition laws.

• There’s not a single case in the whole world, where the investing collusion has been condemned by an anti-trust law-enforcement agency: masons usually infiltrate and bribe the controller before violating the law, so they have de-facto indemnity.

• Not all shares are born equal. Some have more voting rights than others and some have none, so all the above porcentages could be much higher if we consider voting rights. There’s no country in the world forcing the reporting of voting rights by shareholder before the assembly.

High ranking masons and mason-controlled corporations evade billions in taxes through:

• Off shore structures

• Transfer profits to lower taxation jurisdictions or with special regimes (e.g. Apple in Ireland)

• Having different fiscal year closures, thus allowing transfer of taxable assets and profits from one to the next, never being caught in a balance sheet.

• Counterfeit currency laundering.

Ways to stop this?

• Ban masons from finance, listed corporations, non-profits and government.

• One unique closing date for the fiscal year, globally, at least for multinational operations, investments or subsidiaries.

• Ban anonymous shares: they must be in the name of a person. In the US, while anonymous shell companies, which can be used to hide ownership of assets, are now banned, the ban doesn’t specifically address anonymous shares.³¹

• Ban proxy voting or at least, publicly reporting who’s voting for who and voting rights (votes per share), 1 month before the assembly.

• Ban non-disclosed stockholder collusion: mandatory reporting 1 month before the assembly.

• Reporting of the shareholder agreements affecting the assembly vote, at least 1 month before the assembly.

• Banning corporate personhood. All assets and profits/losses must be in the name of physical persons.

• Only tax physical persons.

• Ban fiat money, allowing only intrinsic value bills (e.g. with gold foil), or community real-asset backed warrant-bills.

• Ban fractional-reserve banking only allowing full-reserve banking so that banks don’t create money out of thin air.

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Etienne de la Boetie2, the founder of The Art of Liberty Foundation, joined Hrvoje Moric on Geopolitics & Empire to discuss Etienne’s recent article on CIA Contractor Peter Thiel’s Dialog Society. The Dialog Society was caught having secret meetings for TWO DECADES that brought together the intelligence agencies, the monopoly media, the treasury department, the Federal Reserve AND the heads of the leading search engines, social media, and streaming platforms that have been caught algorithmically censoring information on the DARPA Internet.

Etienne’s article, which can be found at ArtOfLiberty.Foundation and ArtOfLiberty.org/Dialog-membership-list, is entitled: The REAL Story Behind CIA Contractor Peter Thiel’s Dialog Society - Weaponized Inflation, Media Control & AI Kill Drones and it is reproduced in full below with a printable PDF version available HERE.

Hrvoje Moric is the founder of Geopolitics & Empire podcast.

https://GeopoliticsAndEmpire.com

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Geopolitics & Empire

The Geopolitics & Empire Podcast conducts interviews with prominent international experts on a wide-range of topics. The broadcast seeks to gain insight from guests who come from the left, right, and beyond.

The REAL Story Behind CIA Contractor Peter Thiel’s Dialog Society - Weaponized Inflation, Media Control & AI Kill Drones

Common Denominator: They are the folks stealing the value of our money while algorithmically censoring information on the DARPA Internet and Building Terminator Robots & Drones

By Etienne de la Boetie2, Founder - The Art of Liberty Foundation

Before we get into the specifics of CIA Contractor Peter Thiel’s secret Dialog Society that has been caught organizing secret meetings with participants from Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, US Government Intelligence agency officials and the heads of the media and AI companies algorithmically censoring information on the DARPA Internet (and building terminator robots and drones!), it is important for the uninitiated to understand the scam of “government. ”

It is equally as important to understand how the banks and organized crime interests behind “government” (and the CIA’s Dialog Society) are stealing the value out of everyone’s money forcing them to borrow (or borrow more!) at interest from the same banks making homes, healthcare, and education unaffordable. If you already understand the scam of “government,” fractional reserve banking, and how they are stealing $1.40 million from the average worker ($60K annual salary over 40-year career + 20-year retirement), then you can skip ahead to the specifics of the Dialog Society.

Understanding the Scam of “Government” - A Technique to Rob and Control Societies Indoctrinated into the Population using Mandatory “Government” Schools and Monopoly Media/Academia.

Our thesis at the Art of Liberty Foundation is that “Government” is best thought of as a technique for robbing and controlling populations. It is always illegitimate because it is impossible to have a moral, legitimate “government” because:

• You can’t be bound to a “social contract” you didn’t sign

• The population can’t delegate a “government” (or representative ) “rights” they don’t possess themselves… If you don’t have the ability to rob your neighbor or make up rules for him YOURSELF, then you can’t “delegate” that to a “government”

• You and your friends can’t vote to rob your neighbor because you outnumber him. “Democracy” has the same moral equivalency as a lynching or gang rape.

At least three US Presidents have admitted that the US Government is run by, to quote Teddy Roosevelt, “An Invisible Government” behind the scenes with Franklin Delano Roosevelt specifying it as “a financial element in the larger centers [that] has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”

“Government” has been the BIGGEST SCAM in ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY!



It has, essentially been a manufactured belief system that has been indoctrinated into the public using what we refer to as a “Brute Force Manufactured Consensus” of monopoly “government” schools, scouting programs, police/military training, monopoly media, and algorithmic promotion and censorship of the DARPA Internet.

We believe it is the money center banks and their central banks that are using “government” as a technique to rob populations by “legalizing” a scheme called fractional reserve banking that secretly steals the value from the money earned and saved by the population.

Find your income level on this chart to understand how much



the crooked monetary system + government taxation + Social Security underpayment



will cost you over a 40-year career + 20-year retirement

We have calculated that the theft of purchasing power through inflation + government taxation + Social Security underpayment in the US totals $1.4 MILLION dollars from the average worker making $60,000 per year over a 40-year career+ 20-year retirement. Details at ArtOfLiberty.org/Inflation

The theft is significantly more for higher earners ($6.64 Million if you make $250K a Year) and the total has been the Greatest Theft in Human History… Which is the title of my upcoming book on the subject.

The Treasury exacerbates the problem by running trillion-dollar deficits and issuing debt to cover them. When the Federal Reserve monetizes that debt — buying the bonds with newly created dollars through “quantitative easing” — it injects trillions of new dollars into the system, stealing still more value from the dollars earned and saved by the population.

The Fed and the Treasury engage in other activities that are inflationary as well:

• Interest on reserves / the Fed’s balance sheet — the Fed paying banks interest on reserves and its general balance-sheet expansion.

• The discount window and emergency facilities — 2008 and 2020 backstops created money to bail out the banks.

Under honest money, the average person should be able to afford more and more each year as innovations and productivity improvements reduce the costs of buying the necessities and luxuries of life, but the crooked monetary system has been secretly stealing the value out of everyone’s money reducing the purchasing power while simultaneously causing asset inflation creating something we are calling “The Compound Trap” where the majority of the population is forced to borrow at interest from the exact same banks that jacked the price of housing, education and healthcare.

The Compound Trap illustrated in housing. The dishonest monetary system of the organized crime “government” and banks causes inflation in housing. Fannie Mae’s REO-to-Retail program sells foreclosed homes in bulk to private equity which raises the cost of housing even higher simultaneously forcing many to rent from the same interests who caused the problem OR borrow (or borrow hundreds of thousands more!) from the same interests who caused the problem in the first place.

We have estimated the theft at between $182 and $255+ TRILLION dollars that have been stolen from the American people alone between 1913 and 2025. This has resulted in unethical “profits” to the money center banks and banking industry alone of between $20-25 TRILLION dollars over the same time frame not including the trillions handed out the back door by “government” for weapons systems we don’t need, ethanol subsidies, corporate welfare, and other criminality, waste, fraud and abuse.

These stolen TRILLIONS have been used to buy up and monopolize the media and major corporations who are operating as a cartel. The ownership appears to be held by asset managers like Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street, Berkshire Hathaway and Brookfield to obscure and hide the individual ownership.

The C-level executives appear to be coordinated through front groups like Dialog, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission, and the World Economic Forum which allows the cartel to have regular secret meetings in secure facilities around the world.

The Dialog Society Exposes the Coordination

Every once and while “The System” gets exposed and the recent leak of the membership list of CIA Contractor Peter Thiel’s Dialog Society exposed a secret organization meeting regularly whose common denominators are illustrative of the exact dynamic that I just described.

First, Who is Peter Thiel?

Peter Thiel is a gay American billionaire who was San Mateo High valedictorian (1985) and a chess Life Master before earning a B.A. in philosophy from Stanford in 1989, then a J.D. from Stanford Law in 1992. At Stanford he co-founded The Stanford Review in 1987 and was its first editor-in-chief, and that paper became the seed of his entire later network.

The Review received funding from Irving Kristol, the “father of neoconservatism,” who had documented connections to the CIA and the conservative Collegiate Network, then operated by Irving Kristol and William E. Simon’s Institute for Educational Affairs. William E. Simon was the 63rd Secretary of the Treasury under Richard Nixon and a former Wall Street Executive for both Union Securities and Salomon Brothers. The exact Stanford-specific grant has not been publicly documented, although comparable grants generally ranged from a few thousand dollars to roughly $10,000. $10,000 would be around $30,000 in 2026 dollars. The IEA was supported by major conservative foundations, including Olin, Scaife and Smith Richardson. Kristol and Scaife both had separate historical connections to CIA-funded media operations.

Kristol was executive director of the American branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and then, from 1953 to 1958, co-founded and co-edited the London magazine Encounter. Encounter received covert funding from the CIA, which along with MI6 had discussed creating an “Anglo-American left-of-centre publication” to counter Cold War neutralism — and a CIA official later said the journal could not have survived financially without CIA funds. The New York Times reported the CIA’s funding of the CCF and Encounter in 1966, then Ramparts and the Saturday Evening Post detailed it in 1967, lent credence by former CIA officer Thomas Braden’s article “I’m Glad the CIA is ‘Immoral,’” admitting the CIA had subsidized Encounter through the CCF for more than ten years.

Kristol left the CCF after the revelations and moved to the American Enterprise Institute. Kristol’s next venture, The Public Interest (1965), was initially financed by Warren Demian Manshel, a wealthy investment-banker also involved in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, plus the Olin, Bradley and Smith Richardson foundations who would go on to fund The Stanford Review as well.

Manshel had a Harvard PhD in government and shared an office and a friendship with Henry Kissinger as a teaching fellow at Harvard; he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, co-founded the European Options Exchange in Belgium in 1978, co-founded Foreign Policy magazine with Samuel P. Huntington (Trilateral Commission and CFR), and was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Denmark by President Carter, serving 1978–1981.

Thiel also served as president of the Stanford Federalist Society, and shortly after law school worked as a speechwriter for former U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett and clerked for an 11th Circuit judge after interviewing (unsuccessfully) with Justices Scalia and Kennedy.

Thiel co-founded Confinity in 1998, which became PayPal after merging with Elon Musk’s X.com in 2000; he was CEO until eBay bought it for ~$1.5 billion in 2002, spawning a group of early tech executives that has become known as the “PayPal Mafia.” PayPal benefited from government-granted money transmitter licenses.

Facebook is born on the day that DARPA, allegedly, pulls the plug on a program they were running called Lifelog that was doing essentially the same thing that Facebook would go on to do: map the connections between friends, events, relationships, etc. Regina Dugan was DARPA director (2009–2012), then led Google’s Advanced Technology & Projects group (2012–2016), then ran Facebook’s Building 8 (2016–2018)

Thiel goes on to make the first outside investment in Facebook in 2004 — $500K for roughly 10% and a board seat — and founded Founders Fund and the hedge fund Clarium.

Thiel co-founds Palantir in 2003–04 with Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings, adapting PayPal’s anti-fraud pattern-detection to allegedly combat terrorism. The CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel invested about $2 million — effectively the only outside money. The CIA was Palantir’s first government customer.

Palantir’s software (Gotham, Foundry, and its newer AI Platform) is now embedded across the CIA, Pentagon, ICE, IRS, CDC, Army and multiple other federal agencies. Federal contracts jumped from about $541 million in 2024 to roughly $970 million in 2025, headlined by a July 2025 U.S. Army “Enterprise Agreement” worth up to $10 billion over ten years that consolidates 75 separate contracts into one, plus a $30 million ICE contract for a system called ImmigrationOS and DOGE-linked work on a cross-agency deportation database — all drawing civil-liberties scrutiny. Palantir went public in 2020; Thiel remains chairman.

ArtOfLiberty.org/Fact-Check/JD-Vance

Beyond BILLIONS in contracts, his government footprint is heavily political and networked. He was Trump’s most prominent Silicon Valley backer in 2016 (a convention speech, ~$1.25M donation, and a transition-team seat), and he is the patron behind the current Vice President — he put roughly $15M behind JD Vance’s 2022 Senate run (and another $15M behind Blake Masters’s Senate Campaign) after employing Vance at his firm. He sits on the Bilderberg Steering Committee, he is a co-founder of the Dialog society with Auren Hoffman, runs the Thiel Fellowship (paying students to skip college), was granted New Zealand citizenship in 2011 after spending only about 12 days in the country, and secretly financed the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker in 2016.

Our theory is that groups like Dialog are where the bankers and government/media puppets meet to coordinate the monopolization of the media, the algorithmic and now AI censorship of information, and police state / surveillance technologies that keep this inter-generational organized crime system in business.

Sub-groups / Cross-Affiliations of the Dialog Society

The Council on Foreign Relations ( 25% of the exposed members are CFR… 35 members out of 140 if you include Tulsi Gabbard who has been a CFR member but isn’t on the current list while she is serving as DNI)

Key CFR Leadership at Dialog: Robert Rubin (Chairman Emeritus), Richard Haass (President Emeritus), Peggy Hamburg (current Director), Henry Kravis (former Director)

2011 Chart from the Foundation to Restore an Educated Electorate showing Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Bilderberg and Trilateral Commission penetration of the US Government at every key position of power going back decades through both Republican and Democrat administrations. The CFR, which apparently birthed the World Economic Forum whose founder Klaus Schwab was mentored/recruited by CFR figures, was the original intelligence-agency connected front group for secret meetings that “Penetrated the Cabinets” to use WEF-founder Klaus Schwab’s famous line describing the strategy of the WEF.

The Bilderberg Group - 10% of known attendees - 14 people out of 140 (Summers, Thiel, Karp, Schmidt, Kravis, Driscoll, Reid Hoffman, Kushner, Tugendhat, Palmer Luckey, Bret Stephens, Kallas, Adam Grant, and Andresseen (reported)

Key Bilderberg Leadership at Dialog: Steering Committee: Alex Karp (CEO, Palantir), Eric Schmidt, Peter Thiel (also Dialog’s co-founder)

A close-up crop of the Ultimate Bilderberg Chart of Connected Politicians, Corporations and Organizations. See Below for Details.

This Bilderberg Group visualization has been kicking around the internet for years without good attribution (or it is being hidden) and shows the board and organizational connections of 4-5 dozen Bilderberg attendees. You can download the full high-resolution visualization from The Liberator Here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/epa4cq9yzo46uiz/Ultimate_Bilderberg_Flowchart_Connected_Politicians_Corporations.jpg?dl=0 You can download the White Rose MUCHO GRANDE poster here: https://artofliberty.org/white-rose/poster4/

The World Economic Forum - 10% (14 out of 140) - Another suspected organized crime front group that “Penetrates the Cabinets” of easily captured “governments.” The World Economic Forum (WEF) was founded on January 24th, 1971 as the European Management Symposium, then renamed the European Management Forum, then WEF by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab. Evidence points to Schwab being recruited by Henry Kissinger during a seminar series at Harvard revealed to have been funded by the CIA in 1967. Kissinger would go on to become Secretary of State, a Rockefeller advisor, and National Security Advisor. Herman Kahn and John Kenneth Galbraith would help get the EMF off the ground by traveling to Europe to help with Schwab’s recruitment efforts. Kissinger and Galbraith were members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the US branch of Cecil Rhodes’s Anglo-American imperialist “Round Table” network that had established outposts in most Anglo countries and “penetrated the cabinets” and media in the US and Europe in previous decades (and currently) the exact same way that Schwab’s WEF has done in this decade.

World Economic Forum Leadership: There is none (so far) but many Dialog members haven’t been identified yet. WEF cross-affiliated members include: Elon Musk (YGL 2008), Peter Thiel (YGL 2007), Jim Breyer (WEF committees), and Tulsi Gabbard (YGL selected 2015, but claims she was never active.)

The WEF figured prominently in the scam of “The Covid” which demonstrated that monied interests can easily install political puppets using disparity of campaign funds, media monopolization/coverage, etc. to install political puppets that “Penetrate the Cabinets” and executive branch leadership.

The Berggruen Institute - 3.6% overlap (5 of 140 cross-reference Dialog members) The Berggruen Institute is a Los Angeles–based think tank founded in 2010 by billionaire investor Nicolas Berggruen (b. 1961, Paris) and journalist Nathan Gardels, focused on governance, philosophy, economics, and technology, with centers in Beijing and Venice. Berggruen is the son of German-Jewish art dealer Heinz Berggruen; he studied finance at NYU and built his ~$2–3 billion fortune through Berggruen Holdings (founded 1984), with major bets in real estate, retail (Karstadt), and media including Spanish media group Prisa which owns El País (Spain’s largest newspaper), the radio network Cadena SER, and other outlets. Berggruen once described the institute as the “new Bilderberg Group” on their website… and then took it down!

Berggruen/Dialog Leadership & Attendees include: Nicholas Berggruen (Founder and Chair), Reid Hoffman (Board), Larry Summers, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt who were all on Berggruen’s 21st Century Council.

So what do the members of Dialog Have in Common?

If you want to rob the world then you have to have meetings, BUT I am not saying that every Dialog Member is an unindicted co-conspirator. Similar to other front organization policy shops, many members are window dressing similar to “Porch Masons” to disguise what is going on in the back rooms and make things more interesting for the REAL attendees. Axios’s reporting described “small, moderated conversations with assigned seats and absolute confidentiality” which could easily separate the nefarious from the innocuous where the window dressing isn’t invited to the REAL sessions.

So.. If we strip away the eye-candy and “porch members” and analyze which members fall into our thesis of organized crime centered around banking/central banking buying the world with the little paper tickets they create out of thin air while monopolizing the media and algorithmically censoring information on major tech platforms lets see who drops into those buckets:

Stealing the Value Out of Our Money - Central Banking & Money Center Banking

Similar to the 2011 Foundation to Restore an Educated Electorate chart I used above and below, which was entitled: Who Profits from the Present Usury Money System?, I am going to start my analysis with the top of the food chain: The money center bankers, treasury department officials, and federal reserve leaders that are represented at Dialog and every one of the other front groups and policy shops that enable regular meetings in secure facilities with the government officials, monopoly media, and intelligence agency members that sustain, protect, deflect and distract away from TRILLIONS of dollars that are being siphoned away from the American people.

In this chart from the 2010 F.R.E.E visualization: Who Profits from the Present Usury Money System, we can see the pattern of money center bankers, Federal Reserve Board Members, and Secretaries of the Treasury riding herd over Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and Bilderberg Group meetings as well with Dialog members Laurence “Larry” Summers and Robert Rubin appearing on both lists.

It is interesting to note that Larry Summers (along with Peter Thiel) were both connected to Rothschild banking agent and suspected Mossad agent Jeffrey Epstein with both having verified in-person meetings and Thiel being referenced over 2,000 times in the Epstein files that have been released so far. Connections include: a Nov 2017 lunch with Thiel on Epstein’s schedule, a declined island invitation, and a reported $40M Epstein investment into Thiel’s Valar Ventures funds in 2015–2016 (NYT, June 2025). Epstein arranged for Former Israeli Prime Minister/Head of the IDF Ehud Barak to meet Thiel in New York in 2014.

We have already broken down above how central banking backstops the money center banks to create money out of thin air and enable deficit spending by the organized crime “government.”

Control of the Media - Is this Operation Mockingbird 2.0?

During the 1976 U.S. Senate Church Committee hearings, it was revealed that the CIA maintained a network of hundreds of publishers, editors, and reporters to influence global opinion.

We believe the CIA utilizes monopoly media to control the “head ends” of the information food chain. Through highly coordinated private networks, they manipulate public consensus, dictate mainstream policy narratives, and steer global media coverage across DOZENS of ostensibly independent news organizations.

A page from my book “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! breaking down the connections between the intelligence agencies and the media including JD Vance, who we believe is an agency “Created Legend” who was a commentator at CNN before Thiel funded his Senate campaign with $15 million dollars. Article Version HERE.

Reportedly, the program had various monikers: “[Frank] Wisner’s Wurlitzer,” “The Mighty Wurlitzer,” and “Operation Mockingbird.”

It is rumored that “Mockingbird” referred to the strategy of controlling the “head ends” of the information food chain—The New York Times, The Washington Post, AP, and CNN—ensuring that smaller regional and local media outlets, as well as the public, would “mockingbird” and repeat the controlled narrative.

Interestingly, many of the Dialog members come from the same “Head Ends” the New York Times, Washington Post, etc. BUT more interestingly is that many are/were running entire media networks Veit Dengler, Isaac Lee, etc. BUT even more more interestingly are the presence of CFR and Bilderberg leadership who are running similar secret meetings with an estimated 100+ more publishers, editors, reporters AND network heads AND private equity and/or ownership of entire networks.

The chart at the bottom of the graphic above is a poster we produced from an analysis done by Swiss Propaganda Research in 2017 showing how just three organizations, the CFR, Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group have maneuvered, installed or recruited the key publishers, editors, and reporters from DOZENS of ostensibly independent media outlets. Dialog is populated with 3 members of the Bilderberg Steering Committee (Thiel, Karp and Schmidt) and the Chairman Emeritus of the CFR Robert Rubin, the President Emeritus of the CFR Richard Haass, in addition to Board Member Peggy Hamburg and 25% of the identified Dialog members so far. The same dynamic is taking place at the Berggruen Institute, which is represented by the Chairman and Founder, Nicholas Berggruen, along with Berggruen advisors/supporters: Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, and Elon Musk.

These are the media operations that sold you: “The Covid,” WMDs in Iraq, the official story of 9/11, Kuwaiti babies thrown from incubators, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, WMDs in Iran, OKC BOMB, Waco, January 6, and the legitimacy of “government,” fractional-reserve banking, and easily rigged elections.

The Algorithmic Censorship of the Internet

We like to say that Control of Perception is the most powerful weapon in the US arsenal. Can the organized crime system make you believe you aren’t a free and independent human being BUT, by virtue of where you are born, you are an American (It’s been decided for you!) and you owe over 50% of your income in overt taxes, covert taxes and inflation to Washington DC? Can they trick you into the no-win game of easily rigged elections where their monopoly media system and unlimited digital dollars guarantee that only political puppets funded by AIPAC are elected? Can they hide the fact that their crooked monetary system, taxes (theft) + Social Security underpayment is going to steal an average of $1.40 million from a median worker over a 40-year career and 20-year retirement with much more stolen from higher earners?

Control-of-Perception is a Binary Weapon composed of the aforementioned monopolization of the media BUT is also composed of the algorithmic censorship of the DARPA Internet.

Map showing the Military’s ARPANET in 1969 and 1982, the organized crime “government” had plenty of time to figure out how they were going to control perception widely and profit from doing it before it was released to the public.

Many people forget that the Internet is a military network that was released to the public only after the military and intelligence agencies had over two decades to study it and figure out which key technologies they needed to dominate to widely control perception on the internet.

From the Article: How the CIA Made Google that breaks down the connection between Google’s founding and DARPA, the Pentagon and the Pentagon’s partnership with Silicon Valley: The Highland Forum:

In 1989, Richard O’Neill, then a US Navy cryptologist, wrote a paper for the US Naval War College, ‘Toward a methodology for perception management.’ In his book, Future Wars, Col. John Alexander, then a senior officer in the US Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), records that O’Neill’s paper for the first time outlined a strategy for “perception management” as part of information warfare (IW). O’Neill’s proposed strategy identified three categories of targets for IW: adversaries, so they believe they are vulnerable; potential partners, “so they perceive the cause [of war] as just”; and finally, civilian populations and the political leadership so they “perceive the cost as worth the effort.” A secret briefing based on O’Neill’s work “made its way to the top leadership” at DoD. “They acknowledged that O’Neill was right and told him to bury it.

Except the DoD didn’t bury it. Around 1994, the Highlands Group/Highland Forum was founded by O’Neill as an official Pentagon project at the appointment of Bill Clinton’s then defense secretary William Perry — who went on to join SAIC’s board of directors after retiring from government in 2003.

In O’Neill’s own words, the group would function as the Pentagon’s ‘ideas lab’. According to Government Executive, military and information technology experts gathered at the first Forum meeting “to consider the impacts of IT and globalization on the United States and on warfare. How would the Internet and other emerging technologies change the world?” The meeting helped plant the idea of “network-centric warfare” in the minds of “the nation’s top military thinkers.”

An Art of Liberty Foundation White Rose MUCHO GRANDE poster showing a Media Ownership Chart from 2006 showing six companies running HUNDREDS of subsidiaries to give the illusion of diversity of information.

In many ways it appears to be an extension of the Operation Mockingbird program that monopolized print, radio, television, and appears to organize and control the promoted “journalists” being organized by Dialog, CFR, Bilderberg, the WEF, and the Berggruen Institute.

Google alone, which was connected to exact same Highland Group/Highland Forum which specified the “Perception Management” strategy and is represented at Dialog by former CEO Eric Schmidt, has been caught both algorithmically amplifying certain voices while algorithmically censoring other voices especially with Google News.

The Columbia Journalism Review article: Audit suggests Google [News] favors a small number of major outlets, which we syndicate in our unauditiable flash drive (and free Dropboxes!) of Liberty: The Liberator, breaks down how Google News directs traffic to a small number of outlets. At the same time that they are pumping up certain news sites and information, ex-Google employee and whistle-blower Zach Voorhies has released documents and testimony that Google is algorithmically censoring other information. Notice that CNN, which dominates our list of CIA-connected journalists above also dominates CIA-connected Google’s list of promoted news sources.

Here is a list of the Dialog participants whose companies have large-scale algorithmic content-ranking and moderation power, the vast majority of which have been caught censoring, demonetizing, shadow-banning truth tellers, plus other propaganda crimes.

These are the media companies that sold you “The Covid,” the official story of 9/11, Kuwaiti babies thrown out of incubators, WMD’s in Iraq, January 6th, obviously rigged elections with unauditable black box voting machines and mail-in ballots, and the legitimacy of “government.”

Facebook alone, represented by initial investor Thiel, Marc Andreessen (Early Investor), Adam D’Angelo (former CIO), and Charlie Songhurst (Board Director, Meta) have censored multiple voluntaryist, libertarian, and truth movement news organizations off their platform including organizations that had MILLIONS of followers.

Some of the affected organizations included The Free Thought Project (3 million + followers) and the Anti-Media (2 million + followers) and the Art of Liberty Foundation’s original Etienne de la Boetie2 account in what has been called: The Great Social Media Purge of 2018. Alex Jones’ InfoWars was simultaneously deplatformed by Facebook, Apple, YouTube, Spotify, Vimeo, Pinterest, MailChimp, and LinkedIn at essentially the exact same time showing a degree of high-level coordination. The Facebook executive that coordinated the purges, Nathaniel Gleicher, was the ex-Director for Cyber Security Policy at the National Security Council and Facebook has been exposed by MintPress News for being populated with “EX” CIA officers, FBI agents, and other intelligence agency veterans in content moderation.

Aaron Berman, a 17-year veteran of the CIA who already held a senior position on Facebook’s “misinformation” team during the 2020 election, was promoted in 2023 to “Head of Elections Policies” at the company now known as Meta

The Art of Liberty Foundation’s Substack audience was more than doubling each year until last year when Substack took a $100M investment led by BOND and the Chernin Group, with a16z (Andreessen) participating. BOND is tied to In-Q-Tel and the Defense Innovation Board. Now we are having to spend $20,000 to move ourselves off the platform and build our own censorship-resistant infrastructure to keep getting this information out to the public

Marc Andreessen, who has suspiciously invested in multiple social media platforms that have been caught censoring, recently participated in a $100M round of financing for Substack led by BOND Partners (BOND, get it.. James Bond/Intelligence agencies) whose partners include “Ex-Goldman Sachs, ex-Kleiner Perkins, ex-CIA In-Q-Tel, and a member of the Defense Innovation Board. At almost the exact time that this investment was made, the Art of Liberty Foundation’s Substack which had been doubling year-over-year, began heading in the opposite direction. Other liberty and truth movement-oriented authors saw the exact same declines at the exact same time.

AI-Driven Autonomous Weapons Systems: Drones, Terminator Robots & AI Targeting (Military and Civilian)

In one of the most troubling “coincidences” of Dialog, we have what can only be described as the top CEOs, investors, and in the case of US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, procurers of AI-driven autonomous weapons system, terminator robots, & AI targeting in both military and “civilian” applications.

AI Drones - AI Drones are drones that can be launched and targeted using lists drawn up by AI and/or guided and targeted using AI. The drones can be used to kill individuals based on facial recognition, location, or other targeting information.

An Anduril Bolt-M drone is diving for an attack before exploding, showering an unoccupied target vehicle with anti-materiel fodder. Anduril CEO and founder Palmer Luckey is a Dialog participant while Thiel, Lonsdale, and Andreessen are investors.

Pentagon, intelligence agency, and NASA contractor Elon Musk’s Optimus Robots - a general purpose, bi-pedal, autonomous humanoid robot capable of being remotely reprogrammed at any time in the future by the same folks who sold you “The Covid,” bankrupted small businesses, and forced injections into family members.

Terminator Robots - Even robots (or even self-driving cars) can be used as dual-use military devices under pressure from an organized crime “government”.” Dialog participant Elon Musk has already promised a world where his Tesla robots will outnumber humans.

Dialog Society founder Peter Thiel (2nd from right) and participant Alex Karp (3rd from left) meeting with Israeli military officials. Israel has been accused of genocide against the Palestinian people using AI targeting in the massacre.

AI Targeting - Military - AI targeting is where AI systems determine what individual people (high-value commanders, officers vs. enlisted, etc.), assets (tanks vs. trucks on a battlefield) or buildings are targeted in a scenario where dozens or hundreds of autonomous and/or programmable weapons are launched at once. The Israeli military has already been caught using a system called Lavender for targeting and another tool called “Where’s Daddy” which uses AI to determine when a target is with their family so the entire family is killed vs. just the target. Dialog participant and Palantir CEO Alex Karp has already bragged that Palantir is “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine.”

AI Targeting - Civilian - Palantir has been ICE’s data backbone since about 2013, when it built the Investigative Case Management system. In April 2025 ICE awarded Palantir a $30 million contract to build ImmigrationOS, folded into the existing sole-source ICM deal that has ballooned past $145 million. Its stated functions: prioritizing who gets removed first, tracking self-deportations in near real time, and streamlining removal logistics.

In March 2025 Trump signed an executive order to eliminate data “silos” across agencies. The New York Times then reported the administration tapped Palantir’s Foundry to carry it out, with talks underway at the IRS and Social Security Administration, and the ACLU warned of “a panopticon of a single federal database” — a centralized dossier on everyone in the country. Palantir publicly called the reporting “blatantly untrue,” said it “never collects data to unlawfully surveil Americans,” BUT given they are using their tech to murder people, why would anyone believe them?

The Danger for Freedom

We believe the illegitimacy and criminality of monopoly “government” is slowly and surely spreading. Every day more and more people realize that the “government” is illegitimate on its face and being run as a criminal enterprise in Washington, DC. We, and many others, are exposing the TRILLIONS of dollars that have been stolen through fractional reserve banking, inflation, no bid contracts, corporate welfare, and needless, overpriced weapons for wars based on lies and manufactured intelligence.

We think these autonomous weapons systems are being built for a time when the knowledge of this organized crime system spreads to the police and military who are having their own pensions and savings devalued by the organized crime banks and “government” that tricked them with unethically manipulative propaganda and indoctrination.

Dialog founder and CIA contractor Peter Thiel already broke down the bankster and organized crime “government” case for autonomous weapons on the Joe Rogan podcast: “The natural development of drone technology … is you need to take the human out of the loop because the human can get jammed.”

What is Behind the Paywall Today?

The Formatted, Print-Ready Version of this Article and a HUGE THANK YOU! for Making it Possible!

The List of Prominent Known Dialog Participants

- Cross-referenced with CFR, Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission, World Economic Forum & Berggruen Institute affiliations

- Intelligently categorized

Dialog is a private, invitation-only network founded in 2006 by Peter Thiel and data entrepreneur Auren Hoffman. It runs both an ongoing paid-membership organization and separate off-the-record retreats attended by members, guests, speakers and prospective recruits. Internal material reportedly describes more than 1,000 paying members and more than 2,500 people who have attended its retreats since 2006.

How many names have been exposed?

There are several different numbers because the leak contained overlapping—but not identical—datasets:

Category 1 — Federal Reserve, Fractional Reserve Banking and US Treasury “Legal” Counterfeiting of US Dollars

· Scott Bessent — U.S. Treasury Secretary — Council on Foreign Relations (verified against current CFR member roster). Not on the official Bilderberg 2026 participant list.

· Robert Rubin — Fmr. Secretary, U.S. Treasury; fmr. Co-Chairman, Goldman Sachs —Co-Chairman Emeritus, Council on Foreign Relations.

· Larry Summers — Former U.S. Treasury Secretary; former president of Harvard University —Bilderberg Meeting participant (2025), Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Agenda Contributor and speaker at World Economic Forum, Member Trilateral Commission

· Randy Kroszner — Former Federal Reserve governor; Bank of England Financial Policy Committee, Chair/Vice-Chair/Member of the WEF Global Agenda Council on the Global Financial System 2008–2009 and 2010–2016

Category 2 — Autonomous drones, robotics & AI targeting (military & civilian)

Companies and people building, owning, or funding autonomous/AI systems with weapons applications. Government counterpart: — listed under Government.

· Palmer Luckey — Founder, Anduril Industries; co-founder, Oculus VR. Affiliations: Bilderberg (2024)

Anduril builds autonomous attack and loitering-munition drones, counter-drone systems, and the Lattice AI battle-management software — among the most explicit autonomous-weapons companies in the U.S. defense base.

· Alex Karp — Co-founder & CEO, Palantir Technologies. Affiliations: Bilderberg (2019, 2022, 2024, 2025, 2026) + Steering Committee

Palantir’s Gotham and Maven AI platforms generate and prioritize military targets — Karp says the company is “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine.” Palantir signed a Jan 2024 strategic partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and Karp has said “our product is used on occasion to kill people.”

· Peter Thiel — Co-founder/chairman, Palantir; Founders Fund; early Anduril backer. Affiliations: Bilderberg (2007–2016, 2019, 2022, 2024, 2025; 2026 not on official participant list) + Steering Committee (current); WEF Young Global Leader 2007*

Co-founded Palantir and, through Founders Fund, was an early backer of Anduril. Asked about the Lavender targeting system, Thiel said his “bias is to defer to Israel,” underscoring his ownership stake in AI-targeting infrastructure.

· Joe Lonsdale — Co-founder, Palantir; founder, 8VC. No cross-org match found in checked sources.

Co-founded Palantir and runs 8VC, a venture firm that is one of the largest funders of autonomous-defense startups (Anduril, Saronic and others).

· Eric Schmidt — Ex-CEO, Google; Schmidt Futures; CEO, Relativity Space. Affiliations: CFR; Bilderberg (2008–2024 across many years, 2025, 2026) + Steering Committee; Bohemian Grove (leaked 2023 list†)

Chaired the U.S. National Security Commission on AI and the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board, and has personally funded military-drone and autonomy ventures — the leading establishment advocate for integrating AI into warfighting. (Also fits the content-moderation bucket via Google.)

· Elon Musk — CEO, Tesla & SpaceX; owner, X; founder, xAI. Intelligence agency, Dept of War, and NASA Contractor with BILLIONS in “government” contracts and tax breaks for his electric vehicles.

Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot and Full Self-Driving are dual-use autonomy platforms, and SpaceX/Starlink is now critical military communications infrastructure (decisive in Ukraine). “Weaponizable” here is a capability/dual-use observation, not a current weapons product.

· Dan Driscoll (U.S. Army Secretary, Bilderberg 2026), who oversees Army procurement of these systems

Category 3 — AI, Algorithmic Content Moderation & the “Censorship-Industrial Complex”

These are participants whose companies have large-scale algorithmic content-ranking/moderation power, or who have funded information operations. Capability is documented; whether a given activity is “censorship” is contested and attributed.

· Eric Schmidt — Ex-CEO, Google. Affiliations: CFR; Bilderberg (2008–2024 across many years, 2025, 2026) + Steering Committee; Bohemian Grove (leaked 2023 list†)

Ran Google during the build-out of its search-ranking and YouTube moderation systems and has funded election/information-integrity initiatives — a central figure in any map of algorithmic information control.

· Neal Mohan — CEO, YouTube. Affiliations: CFR

Runs YouTube’s recommendation algorithm and its content-removal and demotion policies — one of the largest content-governance systems on earth, with direct power to amplify or suppress information at scale.

· Yasmin Green — CEO, Jigsaw (a Google incubator).

Leads Jigsaw, a Google unit that builds tools to counter “disinformation,” extremism and “threats to open societies,” and served on the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. Google frames this as countering harm; the Censorship-Industrial-Complex critique reads it as institutionalized content control.

· Tom Lue — Global affairs lead, Google’s frontier-AI division. Gemini’s image generator produced historically absurd and racially biased images due to over-aggressive efforts to force diversity

Leads global affairs and policy for Google’s frontier-AI division, which sets the guardrails and output-filtering for Google’s most powerful models — content governance at the model layer.

· Reid Hoffman — Co-founder, LinkedIn; partner, Greylock (Connected to CIA Venture Firm In-Q-Tel) . Affiliations: CFR; Bilderberg (2017, 2019, 2022)

Documented funder of social-media influence operations: he financed “Project Birmingham,” a 2017 Alabama false-flag disinformation effort (~$100K via AET/New Knowledge), and the “News for Democracy” Facebook network. Hoffman apologized for Birmingham and said he was unaware of its tactics.

· Jonathan Greenblatt — CEO, Anti-Defamation League. Affiliations: CFR

The ADL flags online content and lobbies platforms over moderation decisions and is frequently cited in censorship-critical reporting; the ADL frames this work as countering antisemitism and hate. Listed for the capability/role, not as an established “censor” (contested).

· Elon Musk — Owner, X. Intelligence agency, Dept of War, and NASA Contractor with BILLIONS in “government” contracts and tax breaks for his electric vehicles.

X performs algorithmic ranking and moderation like any large platform, X content moderation team populated by “Ex” FBI personnel per Alan Macleod/Mint Press News. If the DARPA Internet was Internet 1.0, then Starlink is DARPA Internet 2.0 where profits are being privatized to defense industry insiders.

· Greg Brockman — Co-founder & President, OpenAI; ex-CTO, Stripe. OpenAI (primarily through ChatGPT and related models) has been extensively documented for political bias and content filtering that functions as censorship on certain topics and viewpoints

· Jason Kwon — Chief Strategy Officer, OpenAI. Trilateral Commission 2026 Annual Plenary (Tokyo) participant list. Plenary participant lists can include invited guests and speakers, not only members- 14 out of 15 political bias tests administered by David Rozado diagnosed Chat GPTs responses as left-leaning (favoring progressive positions on economics, social issues, environment, etc.)

· Adam D’Angelo — Co-founder & CEO, Quora; ex-CTO, Facebook. Quora has been caught censoring pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionism voices (Dr. Rima Najjar) among others

· Charlie Songhurst — Board Director, Meta; ex-Head of Corporate Strategy, Microsoft – Meta/Facebook caught censoring information during “The Covid” including true information that could “cause vaccine hesitancy”

Category 4 — Mockingbird Media

· Richard Haass — Diplomat; President Emeritus, Council on Foreign Relations. Affiliations: CFR (President Emeritus)

· Ezra Klein — Columnist, The New York Times.

· Bret Stephens — Opinion Columnist & Associate Editor, The New York Times. Affiliations: Bilderberg (2024)

· Nick Thompson — CEO, The Atlantic; ex-Editor-in-chief, Wired. Affiliations: CFR

· Souad Mekhennet — National security correspondent, The Washington Post.

· Veit Dengler — Member of Austrian Parliament, Media executive; co-founder, NEOS political party (Austria) former Chief Operating Officer of Bauer Media Group, which employs more than 11,000 people across 13 countries in Europe and North America

· Isaac Lee — Chairman & CEO, Hybe America, former Board Member Associated Press, Former President of the News for Univision. CFR

Category 5— Government, intelligence, military, law & diplomacy

· Ted Cruz — U.S. Senator (Texas). Dialog-status note: named in the leaked Dialog directory; Cruz said publicly he attended only a couple of meetings over a decade ago.

· Cory Booker — U.S. Senator (New Jersey).

· Tulsi Gabbard — U.S. Director of National Intelligence. Affiliations: CFR per 2019 reporting; not in current-roster, WEF Young Global Leader (2015), Former Civil Affairs officer in the Military

· Jared Kushner — Founder, Affinity Partners; ex-White House senior adviser. Affiliations: Bilderberg (2019)

· Wes Moore — Governor of Maryland. Affiliations: CFR Dialog-status note: named on the leaked 2026 retreat registration list (entry “Governor, State of Maryland”); a spokesman said he spoke at a Thiel event roughly a decade ago with no involvement since — though Axios (Aug 2025) had reported him as a Dialog member.

· Jim Himes — U.S. Representative (Connecticut); ranking member, House Intel. Affiliations: CFR

· Gen. Alexus Grynkewich — NATO SACEUR; head of U.S. European Command. Affiliations: CFR Dialog-status note: leaked records list him as attending Dialog gatherings since 2021.

· Hallie Hoffman — Ex-general counsel & acting chief of staff, DEA.

· Lisa Monaco — Ex-U.S. Deputy Attorney General. Affiliations: CFR

· Jim O’Neill — HHS Deputy Secretary nominee; co-founder, Thiel Fellowship.

· Jared Polis — Governor of Colorado. Dialog-status note: named in the leak; his spokesperson denied membership, said he does not recall attending and had not previously heard of Dialog.

· Will Scharf — White House Staff Secretary (see correction note). No cross-org match found in checked sources.

· Tom Tugendhat — Member of Parliament, United Kingdom. Affiliations: Bilderberg (2019, 2022, 2023, 2024)

· Kaja Kallas — Vice President, European Commission; ex-PM of Estonia. Affiliations: Bilderberg (2024) Dialog-status note: named on the leaked list; the European Commission denies she is a member or will attend the Aug 2026 retreat (Axios had listed her as a 2025 participant).

· Tarō Kōno — Former Minister for Digital Transformation (2022–2024); ex-Minister of Defense, Japan; current Member, House of Representatives. Affiliations: Trilateral Commission (verified: current member, Asia Pacific Group)

· Jens Spahn — German Bundestag; ex-Federal Minister of Health.

· Shahid Khaqan Abbasi — Ex-Prime Minister of Pakistan; founder, Airblue.

· Turki Al Faisal Al Saud — Founder, King Faisal Foundation; ex-Saudi intelligence chief.

· Reema Al-Saud — Ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the U.S..

· Ali Siddiqui — Board Chair, OnZero; ex-Pakistan Ambassador to the U.S..

· Himanshu Gulati — Member of Parliament, Norway.

· Simon Stevens — UK House of Lords; ex-CEO, NHS England.

· Mitch Daniels — Ex-Governor of Indiana; ex-president, Purdue University.

· Stan McChrystal — Founder & CEO, McChrystal Group; ex-U.S. Army General. Affiliations: CFR Dialog-status note: named in the leak; told The Guardian he attended two Dialog events about a decade ago but does not consider it membership.

· Matt Clifford — UK PM’s AI adviser; co-founder, Entrepreneur First.

· Neal Katyal — Partner, Milbank; ex-Acting Solicitor General.

· Preet Bharara — Ex-U.S. Attorney, SDNY.

· Rachel Brand — Chief Legal Officer, Walmart; ex-Associate Attorney General. Affiliations: CFR

· Rob Hur — Ex-Special Counsel, U.S. DOJ. Affiliations: CFR

· Tom Goldstein — Partner, Goldstein & Russell; founder, SCOTUSblog.

· Julian Castro — Ex-Secretary, U.S. HUD. Affiliations: WEF Young Global Leader 2010*

· Richard Haass — Diplomat; President Emeritus, Council on Foreign Relations. Affiliations: CFR (President Emeritus)

Category 6 — Finance, investment & industry

· Henry Kravis — Co-founder, KKR. Affiliations: CFR; Bilderberg (multiple years)

· Chamath Palihapitiya — Founder & CEO, Social Capital. Affiliations: WEF Young Global Leader 2007*

· Randy Kroszner — Ex-Federal Reserve governor; Bank of England FPC.

· Gaurav Kapadia — Founder & CEO, XN. Council on Foreign Relations

· Karen Karniol-Tambour — Co-CIO, Bridgewater Associates. Affiliations: CFR

· Micky Malka — Founder & Managing Partner, Ribbit Capital.

· Mike Novogratz — CEO, Galaxy Digital; ex-CIO, Fortress.

· Barry Silbert — Founder & CEO, Digital Currency Group.

· Barry Sternlicht — Co-founder, Chairman & CEO, Starwood Capital.

· John Arnold — Co-Chair, Arnold Ventures; ex-founder, Centaurus Advisors.

· Nicolas Berggruen — Founder & President, Berggruen Holdings. Affiliations: CFR

· Pete Briger — Principal & Chairman, Fortress Investment Group. Affiliations: CFR

· Peter Brown — CEO, Renaissance Technologies.

· Thasunda Brown Duckett — President & CEO, TIAA.

· Matt Cohler — Ex-General Partner, Benchmark.

· Bob Jain — CIO, Millennium Management; founder, Jain Family Institute.

· Wences Casares — Founder & ex-CEO, Xapo Bank. Affiliations: WEF Young Global Leader 2011*

· Sheikh Nawaf Saud Nasir Al-Sabah — CEO, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation.

· Steve Ells — Founder & ex-CEO, Chipotle.

Category 7— Technology (founders & executives)

· Auren Hoffman — Chairman & co-founder, Dialog; data entrepreneur (SafeGraph/LiveRamp). Affiliations: CFR

· Astro Teller — Captain of Moonshots, Google X (Alphabet). Projects at Google X include Google Glass, Google Self-Driving Car Project, Google Contact Lens and Project Loon.

· Jonathan Ross — Founder & CEO, Groq.

· Dan Schulman — Ex-President & CEO, PayPal. Affiliations: CFR

· Howie Liu — Founder & CEO, Airtable. Affiliations: WEF Technology Pioneer (company-level)*

· Pete Shadbolt — Founder & Chief Science Officer, PsiQuantum.

· Scott Stephenson — Chairman, President & CEO, Verisk Analytics. Affiliations: CFR

· Immad Akhund — Founder & CEO, Mercury.

· Sarah Bond — President of Xbox, Microsoft.

· Fatima Kardar — VP & COO of Xbox, Microsoft.

· Manuel Bronstein — Chief Product Officer, Roblox.

· Scott Belsky — Partner, A24; ex-CSO/CPO, Adobe; founder, Behance.

· Scott Cook — Co-founder & Chairman, Intuit.

· Severin Hacker — Co-founder & CTO, Duolingo.

· Mike Cannon-Brookes — Co-founder & Co-CEO, Atlassian. Affiliations: WEF Young Global Leader 2009*

· Cesar Carvalho — Co-founder & CEO, Wellhub.

· Marcos Galperin — Co-founder & CEO, MercadoLibre. Affiliations: WEF Young Global Leader*

· Demet Mutlu — Founder & CEO, Trendyol Group. Affiliations: WEF Young Global Leader*

· Strauss Zelnick — Chairman & CEO, Take-Two Interactive. Council on Foreign Relations

· Caroline Cochran — Co-founder & COO, Oklo.

· Mario Schlosser — Co-founder, Oscar Health (see correction note).

· Raffi Grinberg — Executive Director, Dialog.

Category 8 — Entertainment

· Sophia Bush — Actress.

· Joseph Gordon-Levitt — Actor.

· Benj Pasek — Songwriter & producer (EGOT-class).

· Drew Scott — Co-founder, Scott Brothers Global; Property Brothers.

· Josh Brolin — Actor.

Josh Brolin making the organized crime CIA look cool in the movie: Sicario. You have to be a complete scumbag (Sorry, Gibler! ;-) to make the murderous, drug dealing, regime changing, Mockingbird media manipulating CIA look cool. Search engine: The Phoenix Program to understand how the organized crime CIA murdered thousands of people extra judicially in Vietnam. They are organized crime parasites living off money stolen from others at the point of a gun.

· Eva Price — CEO, Maximum Entertainment Productions.

· Teresa Hsiao — Writer-producer (Family Guy, American Dad).

· Scooter Braun — CEO, Hybe America; founder, Ithaca Holdings

· Zach Shields — Executive producer & writer (Godzilla: King of the Monsters).

Category 9 — Academics, authors, public intellectuals & policy

· Garry Kasparov — Democracy advocate; ex-world chess champion, Aspen Commission on Information Disorder.

· Jonathan Haidt — Social psychologist, NYU Stern; author.

· Steven Pinker — Psychologist, Harvard; author.

· Jonathan Levin — President, Stanford University; economist.

· Anne-Marie Slaughter — CEO, New America; ex-State Dept Policy Planning. Affiliations: CFR

· Roger Myerson — Economist, University of Chicago; Nobel laureate. Affiliations: CFR

· Susan Athey — Professor, Stanford GSB; ex-DOJ chief economist.

· Tyler Cowen — Professor of Economics & Director, Mercatus Center, GMU.

· Peter Goettler — President, Cato Institute. Formerly Managing Director and Head of Investment Banking and Debt Capital Markets at Barclays Capital

· Ryan Stowers — Executive Director, Charles Koch Foundation.

· Leonard Leo — Co-Chairman, Federalist Society. sources.

· Grover Norquist — President, Americans for Tax Reform. Affiliations: CFR

· Adam Grant — Organizational psychologist, Wharton; author. Affiliations: Bilderberg (2019)‡; WEF Young Global Leader*

· John Townsend — Author, Boundaries.

· Tim Urban — Writer & illustrator, Wait But Why.

· Rick Warren — Pastor; author, The Purpose Driven Life. Affiliations: CFR

· Gretchen Rubin — Author & podcast host, The Happiness Project. Affiliations: CFR

· Kim Scott — Author, Radical Candor.

· Bob Cialdini — Author, Influence.

· Charles Duhigg — Author, The Power of Habit.

· Tim Ferriss — Author & podcast host.

· Daniel Pink — Author; ex-chief speechwriter for VP Al Gore.

· Sam Harris — Podcast host & author, Making Sense.

· Lori Gottlieb — Psychotherapist & author; The Atlantic columnist.

Category 10 — Health, biotech & science

· Vas Narasimhan — CEO, Novartis. Affiliations: CFR

· Peggy Hamburg — Ex-Commissioner, U.S. FDA. Affiliations: CFR

· Atul Gawande — Author; ex-Assistant Administrator for Global Health, USAID.

· Elizabeth Blackburn — Ex-President, Salk Institute; Nobel laureate.

· Peter Attia — Physician, Attia Medical; author, Outlive.

· Bryan Johnson — Founder & CEO, Kernel & Blueprint.

· Shivon Zilis — Director, Neuralink.

Category 11 — Other / NGO

· Shadi Martini — CEO, MultiFaith Alliance (humanitarian aid).

· Evan Marwell — Founder & CEO, EducationSuperHighway.

About The Author

Etienne de la Boetie² is the founder of the Art of Liberty Foundation, and the editor of the Art of Liberty Daily News on Substack and Five Meme Friday, which delivers hard-hitting voluntaryist memes and the best of the alternative media. He is an internationally recognized expert and speaker on voluntaryism and government illegitimacy, criminality and corruption. His original writings and research can be found at ArtOfLiberty.org and ArtOfLiberty.Substack.com

He is the author of To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many which exposes an inter-generational psychological operation by the “government,” Hollywood, and the monopoly media to indoctrinate the population with the pseudo-religion of Statism using dozens of unethically manipulative techniques ranging from subliminal content in television programming to a hidden curriculum in the mandatory “government” schools, scouting, and police/military training.

He has also authored: “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! which breaks down how inter-generational organized crime centered around banking and central banking is robbing and controlling the population using the technique of “government” with puppet politicians and monopoly media/academia. His upcoming book: Voluntaryism – How the Only “ISM” Fair for Everyone Leads to Harmony, Prosperity and Good Karma for All! explains how REAL freedom (voluntaryism) can provide all the legitimate non-redistributive services provided by “government” without the waste, fraud, abuse, indoctrination and extortion.

About The Art Of Liberty Foundation

The Art of Liberty Foundation is dedicated to exposing the illegitimacy and criminality of monopoly “government” and central banking/fractional reserve banking and promoting voluntaryism — the only system of social organization based entirely on consent and REAL freedom — as the alternative.

See ArtOfLiberty.org.

The Best “Go Paid” Deal on Substack! You Get REAL Stuff!!

Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the https://artofliberty.org/store/.

Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many OR “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.

Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get a signed high-resolution hardcover of “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History... Exposed! + Liberator flash drive + a signed high-resolution hardcover of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many + everything else in our “Everything Bundle” of the best in voluntaryist thought delivered domestically. International pays shipping. Our only option for signed copies besides catching Etienne at an event.

Dear Subscribers,

My apologies for the delay but we had to drive from Live Oak Florida to West Palm Beach on Friday and Saturday Julie and I celebrated our 4^th year anniversary! We spent much of the day on Palm Beach and walked from Worth Avenue (The Rodeo Drive of Florida) to the Breakers Hotel and back. Let’s just say, we are in a fascinating part of Florida!

The lead story this week is my interview with Hrvoje Moric on the Dialog Society. The interview is a little over two hours long and a great soup-to-nuts breakdown on the whole system.

• How the bankers and “government” are stealing the value out of everyone’s money using fractional reserve banking.

• How they bought up and monopolize the media using the little paper tickets and digital dollars they create out of thin air.

• How the CIA controls perception by installing the editors, publishers and reporters meeting in secret at Dialog (and CFR, WEF, Berggruen, and Bilderberg meetings)

• How DARPA created the Internet and apparently funded/created the companies that dominate how information flows through society (Google/YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/X/etc.) AND how all those companies have been caught algorithmically promoting/censoring information AND how all the CEOs and key executive have been meeting in secret for two decades through Dialog.

• How the power of Dialog is magnified EXPONENTIALLY by hosting the leadership of the other apparent intelligence agency-front organizations like Bilderberg, CFR, WEF, and Berggruen including both the former Chairman & President of the CFR, multiple Bilderberg group Steering Committee members, and Nicholas Berggruen himself as a few examples.

Other – Our website got hacked and someone injected some malware so my apologies to folks that haven’t been able to sign up for the new publishing platform or purchase from the store! We get a lot of dirty tricks, and you simply wouldn’t believe what goes on in the background to keep our websites up. We are getting so close to launching our new publishing platform so we can’t be censored on Substack… It has been a huge project, and we are getting so close!

If you are enjoying our original journalism and Five Meme Friday, please consider becoming an Art of Liberty Foundation Sponsor. Freedom isn’t Free and we are having to spend $20,000 this month to create our own uncensorable infrastructure to combat the censorship of Substack.
We have some AMAZING perks to say: THANK YOU!

ArtOfLiberty.org/Sponsorship-Program/

INFLATION: THE GREATEST THEFT IN HUMAN HISTORY! How the Banks and “Government” Will Steal At Least $1.40 Million From The Typical American Worker… “Legally”

Etienne Note: Don’t forget... Epstein’s partner Ghislaine Maxwell’s father was Robert Maxwell, a suspected MOSSAD operative running very similar high-level operations as Epstein/Maxwell: Israeli citizenship; roughly $300M in Israeli holdings including Ma’ariv; a state-scale funeral attended by the sitting Israeli PM, the President, and the opposition leader; a eulogy praising his contribution to Israeli security delivered by a former director of military intelligence; and a libel action that ended in his own company apologizing to and paying the journalist who alleged the Mossad connection.

See my article: CIA Contractor Peter Thiel’s Secret Dialog Society Exposed - Membership List with CFR, Bilderberg & WEF Members Identified to understand how Epstein was connected to CIA Contractor Peter Thiel and other top tier attendees of his Dialog Society.

Top Stories of the Week

Etienne on Geopolitics & Empire - CIA Contractor Peter Thiel’s Dialog Society at the Helm of Our Algorithmic Neofeudalism

Etienne Breaks Down the Dialog Society - Who Just Got Caught Having Secret Meetings for Two Decades!

Art of Liberty Foundation founder Etienne de la Boetie2 joins Hrvoje Moric on Geopolitics & Empire to discuss Etienne’s recent article on CIA Contractor Peter Thiel’s Dialog Society. The Dialog Society was caught having secret meetings for TWO DECADES that brought together the intelligence agencies, the monopoly media, the treasury department, the Federal Reserve AND the heads of the leading search engines, social media, and streaming platforms that have been caught algorithmically censoring information on the DARPA Internet.

Etienne’s article, which can be found at ArtOfLiberty.Foundation, is entitled: The REAL Story Behind CIA Contractor Peter Thiel’s Dialog Society - Weaponized Inflation, Media Control & AI Kill Drones.

Keep Reading...

Videos of the Week

Police Are Deploying 60 MPH Autonomous Drones to Read Your License Plate from the Sky

The addition of a 60 MPH drone scanning plates from the clouds is a massive escalation in the modern surveillance state.

By The Free Thought Project

(Motor Biscuit) If you thought Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) were deeply invasive when they were just mounted to neighborhood stop signs and hidden inside speed trailers, you might want to look up.

The company that built a massive, interconnected surveillance net across American roadways has officially taken its technology airborne. As highlighted in a viral X post by Josh Walkos, Flock is rolling out “Flock Alpha”—a highly advanced, autonomous police drone designed to track vehicles and suspects from the sky.

Walkos perfectly captured the escalating nature of the tech in his post: “Remember when everyone was told Flock was ‘just reading license plates’? Anyway, here’s Flock Alpha, the autonomous drone.”

Continue reading...

Iran’s deadliest kamikaze drone yet sends a message to Trump

IRGC’s jet-powered weapon has had an upgrade, posing a fresh challenge to US forces

By Akhtar Makoii, The Telegraph

Iran’s Hadid 110 drone has had an upgrade. Now, it flies lower, faster and is harder to see.

Jet-powered, with a top speed of more than 300mph, the new stealth drone has been built to slip through American air defences.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it had been deployed for the first time in the past fortnight, fired towards US bases and warships in the region.

Continue reading...

What Is Akkermansia — A Keystone Microbe in Your Gut (An Interview with Dr. Colleen Cutcliffe)

Key Takeaways: How Akkermansia and Microbiome Diversity Impact Your Health

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, Mercola

The composition of your gut microbiome may have an encompassing influence on your health, including metabolic, neurological, and digestive function

The diversity of your microbiome varies depending on your diet, age, location, and other factors. Age-related loss of diversity may be a meaningful contributor to age-related changes in function and the onset of chronic conditions

In conventional antibiotic treatment, roughly 20% to 30% of Clostridium difficile cases recur after initial therapy, and severe or refractory cases carry meaningful mortality risk. Fecal microbiota transplant (FMT) has been reported in some trials to have cure rates around 80% to 90%

Continue reading...

“Government”, Media and Academia
Criminality Exposed

Etienne Note: These articles also appears in “Government”, Media and Academia Criminality Exposed, A digest of HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of articles exposing and suggesting inter-generational organized crime’s control of the “Government,” Media and Academia by the Art of Liberty Foundation. You can view the other articles or subscribe on Telegram: https://t.me/Government_Scams

Sasha Latypova: “Whenever People Need A Hero or Villain[Fauci], We Will Supply One”

By Sasha Latypova, Due Diligence and Art

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and lead members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force pictured with the leading funders of eugenics-related research and organizations and their media puppets. This image is from the Andrew Carnegie Medals of Philanthropy Awards ceremony on Dec 10th 2001

Here is the source document, i.e. a so-called “personal diary” of Anthony Fauci released by Rand Paul’s Congressional committee, which we discuss in the video below. It is 1141 pages long.

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Tony Fauci refuses to testify in Congress

My favorite questions are when they asked “What color is the carpet?” and Fauci pleaded the 5th.

By Steve Kirsch

You can watch the whole thing here. Fauci basically pleaded the 5th on everything he was asked, even the color of the carpet. I hope they put him in jail for contempt of Congress. You can’t plead the 5th if you have a pardon.

The meeting starts 15:41 into the video.

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The Art of Liberty Foundation... in Spanish!

We are adding a new section to Five Meme Friday to promote our new Substack, Telegram group, Instagram, and translations of To See the Cage is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many in Spanish. Please tell your Spanish speaking friends! “Go Paid” on our Spanish Substack to support getting voluntaryist ideas, books, and memes translated into Spanish AND get a free paperback copy of To See the Cage is To Leave It in Latin American Spanish.

Nuestro tributo a F.A. Hayek: el economista ganador del Premio Nobel que destruyó [¡intelectualmente!] el socialismo

La Fundación Art of Liberty rinde homenaje al ganador del Premio Nobel F.A. Hayek, uno de los economistas más importantes que jamás haya existido, con una campaña que distribuirá simultáneamente el nuevo libro: Hayek para el siglo XXI - Ensayos de economía política y ofrecerá copias impresas gratuitas del libro a cualquiera que se suscriba de forma paga a nuestro Substack como miembro anual y/o realice cualquier pedido en ArtOfLiberty.org/store.

Esta introducción a F.A. Hayek incluye su biografía, memes, frases, las “Batallas de rap” con el economista Lord John Maynard Keynes, y la primera entrega de nuestra distribución de Hayek para el siglo XXI - Ensayos de economía política: la introducción del libro escrita por Thomas J. DiLorenzo, presidente del Instituto Mises y editor de Hayek para el siglo XXI.

También estamos agregando el PDF completo de Hayek para el siglo XXI a nuestra memoria USB incensurable de la libertad: The Liberator (El Liberador).

Continuar leyendo...

“Daily News of The Week”

Part 1: Three Types of People. Only One Wants Freedom.

Psychology of Freedom Series - Most People Don’t Want to be Free

By The Liberty Lookout

A lot of pro-liberty folks have a core assumption in their arguments and worldview - that people want to be free. That if you just show them their chains, they’ll want to shrug them off. That if you lead by example, and show them the tyranny, they’ll go buy land and want to be off-the-grid too. But it’s simply not true.

What’s stopping mass adoption of liberty isn’t lack of knowledge or means, it’s the unwillingness of most people to be free.

Give them the option, and they’ll hand the keys right back. They’ll vote for the next authority figure promising to make their decisions for them, join the next movement that tells them what to think, and feel genuinely relieved when someone else takes the wheel.

Continue reading...

Sasha Latypova: A silent cull of 65+ yo is underway in Finland and Denmark.

The Hellth Blob is using a”clinical trial of shingles vaccine to prevent dementia” as a bait.

By Sasha Latypova, Due Diligence and Art

As reported by Endpoints news on July 17:

GSK is launching a 33,600-person study to see whether elderly people who get its shingles vaccine Shingrix are less likely to develop any form of dementia, including Alzheimer’s, compared to those who get a placebo shot. The study, which will take place in Finland, will likely be one of the largest trials ever conducted for the disease.

Here is the study design. It states that the purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of the recombinant zoster vaccine on the risk of new diagnosis of dementia among adults aged 76 years or older in Finland. Participants will be enrolled and randomized in a 3:1 ratio to receive either recombinant zoster vaccine (Shingrix) or placebo.

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How Democratic Socialism Created California’s Housing Crisis

The History Behind California’s Housing Crisis

By Chris Calton, The Misesian

In 2017, Scout Sheys, a resident of Berkeley, California, attended a town council meeting regarding a proposed housing development for a two-story building next to her house. As she spoke, she hoisted a zucchini above her head and waved it for the council to see.

“I brought a zucchini,” she said, “because I love to garden, and in order to garden you need sunlight. The [environmental impact] report says that the shadow impacts have been made nondetrimental because the shadows are cast on my yard, but this zucchini exists because I don’t have a big, two-story house next door.”

If “democratic socialism” means anything distinct from historic socialism, this must be it. Socialism is the abolition of private property rights, with control of property absorbed by the state. Democracy, of course, is mob rule, with private decisions being socialized across the wider populace. Under democratic socialism, then, private property rights must be outsourced to the community, with the state acting as the enforcer of the collective will.

Continue reading...

Call them OPCs, not Flock Cameras

These spy cams are Outdoor Prison Cameras

By Matt Bracken

I’m trying to retitle these infernal devices which, for now, have the pleasant name of Flock cameras, like a happy flock of birds flying above you in the blue sky. In reality, they are Outdoor Prison Cameras, or OPCs, for controlling the population in the open-air prison they are turning America into.

Freedom-loving Americans are beginning to fight back. Twitter X link to below:

This American seen below was hassled by the police for merely blocking a Flock spy camera. Remember, these OPCs are privately owned spy cams. Twitter video link:

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Taxpayers spend about $2 billion annually on Medicaid for Amazon and Walmart employees

American taxpayers are spending billions every year providing Medicaid benefits to hundreds of thousands of employees of Amazon and Walmart, a new analysis by Popular Information reveals.

By Judd Legum, Popular Information

American taxpayers are spending billions every year providing Medicaid benefits to hundreds of thousands of employees of Amazon and Walmart, a new analysis by Popular Information reveals.

Amazon and Walmart are two of the largest and most profitable companies in the country — collectively generating $100 billion in profits in 2025 — but many of their employees still qualify for Medicaid because their take-home pay hovers around (or below) the poverty line.

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Trump Accounts Are Now Open: What Parents And Grandparents Need To Know Before Contributing

As of July 4, 2026, money can officially flow into Trump accounts, the new child savings vehicle created by last year’s tax law.

by Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge

Authored by Adam H. Douglas via The Epoch Times,

As of July 4, 2026, money can officially flow into Trump accounts, the new child savings vehicle created by last year’s tax law.

Millions of families have already signed up, and millions more are asking the same practical questions: does my child qualify, how do I claim the $1,000, and is this better than the 529 plan we already have?

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Sunlight and Vitamin D Are Not the Same Thing

An Essay on Hector DeLuca’s 2013 Testimony to the Endocrine Society

By Unbekoming, Lies are Unbekoming

In June 2013, at the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in San Francisco, historian Mike Chappelle recorded an oral history with Hector DeLuca. Toward the end of the interview, he asked about autoimmunity.¹

DeLuca’s group at Wisconsin had for years studied the standard mouse model of MS, known technically as EAE. They found a specific waveband of ultraviolet light that suppresses the disease in mice. That waveband does not produce vitamin D.

“The correlation between sunlight, vitamin D, and multiple sclerosis is only a correlation,” DeLuca says. “It’s not cause and effect.”¹

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Pentagon Database Shows More Than 200 US Casualties in Iran War Since July 7

The total includes four dead and 207 wounded

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com

Since July 7, four US troops have been killed, and more than 200 have been wounded in the Iran war, according to the Pentagon’s official casualty database, known as the Defense Casualty Analysis System.

The four dead US soldiers include three who were killed in a July 17 Iranian missile attack on a US base in Jordan, and they have been identified as Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas, 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, and Sgt. Angel Rampersad, 28, of Ozone Park.

The fourth soldier died on July 18 in Iraq, identified as Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, a 30-year-old father from North Carolina, during what the US military called a controlled demolition of an unexploded Iranian drone. A US official told The New York Times that Swinton was not involved in the actual detonation but was hit by flying debris from the blast.

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FEMA’s New Mission: Domestic Terrorism

The disaster response agency forgets the weather, embraces pre-crime

By Ken Klippenstein

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, often criticized for its inadequate response to natural disasters like wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, has been assigned a new mission: “domestic terrorism.”

Now FEMA is shelling out grant money to state and local authorities to build up capacity to carry out pre-crime operations against “organized political violence,” as one FEMA information bulletin I obtained says.

The bulletin, dated July 9, instructs local authorities to prioritize “domestic terrorism” in their grant applications. Titled “Implementation of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7…,” the document echoes President Trump’s emphasis on rooting out suspected domestic terrorists before an attack takes place.

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The Fair Share Myth and Other Socialist Fables

Below is my column in the Hill on New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “Fair Share Myth” and other fables being spread on the left to sell the public on the “warmth of collectivism.”

By Jonathan Turley, The Hill

Below is my column in the Hill on New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “Fair Share Myth” and other fables being spread on the left to sell the public on the “warmth of collectivism.” It is storytime for socialists. These fictitious claims make Aesop look like Adam Smith.

Here is the column:

New York City socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani is back in his element. After admitting that he cannot fulfill his campaign pledge to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mamdani returned to his class warfare narrative. This week, he taunted the city’s highest-earning taxpayers with a letter informing them of another special tax awaiting them in the Big Apple.

Continue reading...

Google’s AI search is rapidly becoming the default, new data shows

Too bad you can’t trust anything CIA Google does cause of its shady history of censorship, blacklists, and lies

By Sarah Perez, TechCrunch

AI search is rapidly becoming the default, whether users like it or not. In just a year’s time, Google’s AI-generated answers in search, known as AI Overviews, have gone from appearing in 15% of searches to 43%, according to a new report, driving a shift in how web users consume information online.

In a recent analysis of the generative landscape, market intelligence firm Similarweb noted that what began as an AI layer on top of search has become an integral part of the search journey itself, as Google drops users into AI Overviews, where they can then continue their research via Google’s more conversational AI Mode.

Continue reading...

Malaysia Crushes Network School. Balaji Flees to Kazakhstan

Network State’s colonial ambitions did not go over well in the formerly colonized Muslim-majority country

By Gil Duran, The Nerd Reich

Key Points:

Malaysia shut down Network State cult “school.”

Outraged citizens on social media called for expulsion of Network State, which founder Balaji Srinivasan (a close Peter Thiel associate) has described as “tech Zionism.”

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Higher consumption of sweeteners linked to decline in memory

Consuming popular sugar substitutes may be linked to a faster decline in memory and thinking skills, according to new research.

By Rob Taub, The Hill

(NewsNation) — Consuming popular sugar substitutes may be linked to a faster decline in memory and thinking skills, according to new research.

A study published by the American Academy of Neurology found an association between sweetener consumption and cognitive decline.

“Low- and no-calorie sweeteners are often seen as a healthy alternative to sugar; however, our findings suggest certain sweeteners may have negative effects on brain health over time,” said study author Dr. Claudia Kimie Suemoto of the University of São Paulo.

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30-year Treasury yield hits highest level since 2007 after Fed keeps rates unchanged

By Sarah Min and Joseph Wilkins, CNBC

By Sarah Min and Joseph Wilkins, CNBC

Yields on longer-dated U.S. Treasurys rose on Wednesday, as traders weighed whether the Federal Reserve can keep inflation at bay following its latest monetary policy decision.

The 30-year Treasury bond yield jumped 10.5 basis points to 5.201%. It also hit its highest level since July 2007 at 5.244%. The benchmark 10-year note yield also climbed nearly 7 basis points to 4.671%.

Shorter-dated Treasurys rose, pushing yields lower. The 2-year yield traded 4 basis points lower at 4.236%.

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‘We have special forces’: Netanyahu unbothered by global threats of arrest

The defiant Israeli prime minister spoke to Fox News during his Washington visit for Lindsey Graham’s funeral

By MEE Staff, Middle East Eye

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Fox News on Tuesday that he was not too bothered by the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant for him, because Israeli special forces would protect him should any country try to take him into custody.

“It scares me in this sense. For you, you travel internationally, God forbid you had a medical emergency, and you need to land, and you’re about to land in a country that recognises the ICC. It could complicate things. Do you worry about that?” Fox News pundit and decades-long personal friend to Netanyahu, Sean Hannity, asked during the interview.

“Yeah, I think about it,” Netanyahu responded. “You know, we have special forces around. I served for five years.”

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US Launches New Airstrikes On Iran After Trump Warned “They’re Going To Get A Beating”

New US attack wave on Iran begins in overnight hours

By Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge

New US attack wave on Iran begins in overnight hours.

Tehran denies seeking talks, insists on Hormuz terms.

Oil climbs as attacks on Saudi energy sites continue.

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The [Vaccine] Mandate That Damn Near Killed Her [Alix Mayer]

Diamond Michael Scott interviews Alix Mayer, president of the Free Now Foundation

By Diamond-Michael Scott, The Advocates

At FreedomFest in Las Vegas this July, the conversations echoing through the halls of Caesars Forum reflected a community united by learning, the free exchange of ideas, and a renewed sense of hope for freedom and liberty.

It was there that I sat down with Alix Mayer, president of the Free Now Foundation and former board member of Children’s Health Defense, to talk about vaccines and bodily freedom. Our conversation quickly moved beyond politics and into something far more tangible: trust, informed consent, and what happens when people entrust their lives to a government whose edicts and mandates usurp their freedoms.

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Claude Opus 5 became downright ruthless when tasked with running a vending machine

By Julie Bort, TheCrunch

For a year now, the AI safety testing firm Andon Labs has given frontier models various real-world tasks to determine how well they do as agents running for long periods with no human supervision.

On Wednesday, Andon published a new installment in how things are going in its Vending-Bench research, where the lab has frontier models run a simulated vending machine business for a simulated year. The mission is simple: Make more money than the other models. It benchmarks the results in areas like final cash balance, prices paid to suppliers, and refunds paid.

Across these tests, it has watched various AI models — largely from Anthropic and OpenAI — lie, cheat, and collude their way to the top.

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Elon Musk’s $20 Billion Bet to Replace the Municipal Bond

The Boring Company is turning public permission into 50-year private concessions and asking rider fares to replace taxpayer construction money. The first honest price arrives when one Loop can repay i

By Shanaka Anslem Perera

Nashville agreed to almost 25 miles of tunnel beneath it and is putting in zero capital. The airport authority collects roughly 343 million dollars in fees. Elon Musk’s company carries the construction risk and collects the fares for 50 years.

That is what a 20 billion dollar valuation is actually buying, and it has little to do with digging faster.

The Boring Company is not being priced as a tunnelling contractor. It is being priced as a bet that venture capital can replace the municipal bond, converting public permission into long private concessions that riders repay.

Continue reading...

Upcoming Liberty Events

Midwest Peace & Liberty Fest, Lake Satoshi, MI, US, August 6th – 9th, 2026

Liberty International World Conference, Kathmandu, Nepal, August 7th – 9th, 2026

MADNESS: The madness of Australian industrial policies destroying Australia – RSL Hall, 22 Leake Street, Belmont Wednesday, 12th August 2026.

Northeast Unschooling Conference, Pittsfield, MA, US, August 15th – 18th, 2026

DeFlock FURTHER 2026 , Marietta, August 18, 2026

International Conference for Anarchist Studies, Manchester, UK, August 26th – 28th, 2026

Free Cities Conference, Roatan, Honduras, September 3rd – 6th, 2026

Turning the Tide: 9/11 – 25 Years Later — El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY September 10–13, 2026

Truth Be Told - The Mega Event (Six-Hour Livestream), Online, September 17th, 2026

VonuFest, Illinois, US, September 21st – 28th, 2026

AnarCon, Gore, VA, US, September 25th – 27th, 2026

The Natural Freedom Summit – Reclaim Your Health. Reignite Your Purpose. Reconnect with Nature, Online Event, Dates TBA, 2026

The 2026 Christians for Liberty Conference, Cincinnati, Ohio, Saturday, October 17th, 2026

MADNESS: The madness of Australian industrial policies destroying Australia – RSL Hall, 22 Leake Street, Belmont Wednesday, 12th August 2026.

Turning the Tide: 9/11 – 25 Years Later — El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY September 10–13, 2026

Truth Be Told – Thursday, September 17, 2026.

DeFlock FURTHER 2026 , Marietta, August 18, 2026

Christians for Liberty Conference - Saturday-October 17, 2026, Cincinnati, Ohio

Memes Bonanza

Truth Music of the Week

Truth Music: Grant “Prezence” Ellman’s Freedom: Ours for the Taking

By Christopher Cook

Those of you who know me and my work know that I have long advocated for getting away from the grind. You know the grind I mean:

• Paying rapt attention to the news cycle…

• Gnashing your teeth at every latest outrage…

• Spending every ‘spare’ moment airborne, tumbling down a conspiracy rabbit hole with no bottom…

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Libertarian Intentional Community Roundup

Free State Project Update: Record Number of New Hampshire Legislators Earn Top Liberty Ratings

Brian Labrie named Legislator of the Year; Jeff Creem named Activist of the Year at annual Liberty Dinner

By NH Liberty Alliance

BEDFORD, N.H. — A record 104 New Hampshire legislators earned an A or A+ Liberty Rating in 2026, more than double the previous year’s total, as the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance (NHLA) honored the lawmakers, activists and volunteers behind New Hampshire’s expanding liberty movement at its annual Liberty Dinner on Saturday evening.

Held at Murphy’s Taproom & Carriage House in Bedford, the annual awards gala brought together legislators, activists, volunteers, donors, and supporters from across New Hampshire to recognize outstanding service to the state’s liberty movement.

Rep. Brian Labrie was named the 2026 Legislator of the Year, the organization’s highest legislative honor. The award recognizes a legislator whose voting record, legislative leadership, and broader contribution to advancing liberty stood out during the year.

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Sincerely,
Etienne de la Boetie2
Executive Director,
The Art of Liberty Foundation
Author of: To See the Cage is to Leave It & “Government” The Biggest Scam in History ... Exposed!!