The Daily News from the Art of Liberty Foundation

Consumer prices rose 3.8% annually in April, the highest since May 2023

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:38:41 GMT

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by Jeff Cox

The consumer price index rose at a seasonally adjusted 0.6% for the month, putting the one-year pace at 3.8%, the highest since May 2023.
Excluding food and energy, the core CPI increased 0.4% and 2.8%, respectively, keeping inflation well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal.
Though energy and in particular gasoline has been much of the headline story, inflation pressures also came from a variety of other areas.
The report also contained bad news for workers, as real average hourly wages slipped 0.5% for the month and fell 0.3% annually.

Prices that consumers pay for a wide range of goods and services increased at a faster-than-expected pace in April, as another burst in energy prices raised further concerns about inflation’s impact on the U.S. economy.

The consumer price index rose at a seasonally adjusted 0.6% for the month, putting the one-year pace at 3.8%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday. The monthly rate was as forecast, but the annual rate was 0.1 percentage point above the Dow Jones consensus.

Excluding food and energy, the core CPI increased 0.4% and 2.8%, respectively, keeping inflation well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal as the monthly rate was the highest since January 2025. Fed officials consider core a better indicator of longer-term inflation trends.

The annual headline inflation rate was the highest since May 2023 and was up half a percentage point from March. Core inflation rose 0.2 percentage point annually

Energy prices, which jumped 3.8%, accounted for more than 40% of the headline gain, while food prices also climbed 0.5%. For energy, that put the 12-month gain at 17.9%, while food was up 3.2%. The gasoline index increased 28.4% annually. Food at home prices increased 0.7%, the biggest monthly gain since August 2022.

Though energy and in particular gasoline has been much of the headline story, inflation pressures also came from a variety of other areas.

Shelter costs rose 0.6% after easing in prior months, indicating that inflation is a problem beyond the Iran war impacts. The tariff-sensitive apparel category increased 0.6% and airline fares accelerated 2.8%, putting the 12-month gain at 20.7%. Tariffs also seemed to hit other areas, with household furnishings and operations up 0.7%.

New vehicle prices fell 0.2% while the index for used cars and trucks was flat. Medical care costs decreased 0.1% and hospital services were down 0.3%. Health insurance also declined 0.4%, while motor vehicle insurance increased 0.1%

The report also contained bad news for workers, as real average hourly wages slipped 0.5% for the month and fell 0.3% annually.

Stock market futures were negative following the report while Treasury yields were higher. Traders also raised the odds for a Fed rate hike by the end of the year to about 30%, according to CME Group data.

“Inflation is the key drag on the U.S. economy now,” said Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union. “This is hurting Americans. There is a real financial squeeze underway. For the first time in three years, inflation is eating up all wage gains. This is a setback for middle-class and lower-income households and they know it.”

The latest inflation news comes at a crossroads for the Fed, which has kept its benchmark interest rate steady all year amid misgivings among policymakers both on where the central bank should be heading and how it should communicate its intentions.

In late April, the Fed voted again to hold but saw four dissents, the highest since 1992. Fed Governor Stephen Miran again voted no in favor of a quarter percentage point cut, while three regional presidents objected to language that markets read as an indicator that the next move will be a cut.

At the same time, incoming Chair Kevin Warsh has advocated for lower rates, a position that will be difficult to square with the burst of inflation since the fighting in Iran began. Energy prices have surged, with oil running above $100 a barrel and gasoline averaging $4.50 a gallon nationally, according to AAA.

“Given that inflation is heading in the wrong direction and the labor market is holding up, it’s very unlikely that the Fed will be able to lower interest rates any time soon and it’s possible that we may start pricing in rate hikes for next year,” said Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer at Northlight Asset Management.

Amid the higher rates, consumer sentiment has hit all-time lows though the stock market has been resilient. Major averages are just off their all-time highs as corporate America is nearing the end of a strong earnings season.

Consumer spending also has held up, though it’s largely been pushed by higher-income earners and the general trend higher in prices. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow tracker of incoming economic data is pointing toward economic growth of 3.7% in the second quarter, though on a limited set of data for the period.

“The good news is that the economy looks resilient to this price shock so far,” said James McCann, senior economist for investment strategy at Edward Jones. “Many consumers have benefited from tax refunds this year, hiring has picked up from near stagnant rates in 2025 and businesses are generating robust profit growth. There are limits to these buffers, but we expect, they should provide some reassurance that the economy can weather this shock.”

Correction: The Federal Reserve voted to stay on hold in April. An earlier version misstated the month.

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Why Medicine Won't Cure You (and What's Finally Changing)

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:32:28 GMT

by A Midwestern Doctor

Story at a Glance:

No industry, organization, or cause tasked with solving a problem will actually solve it, because the problem disappearing threatens their economic livelihood or political power—a dynamic visible everywhere from non-profits which constantly seek donations but never produce results to dating apps that deliberately prevent users from finding partners and leaving the platform.
The pharmaceutical industry has perfected this model: drugs are designed to be taken perpetually rather than cure, side effects create demand for additional drugs, and the entire regulatory apparatus is structured to protect this status quo by suppressing affordable natural therapies like DMSO that challenge it.
SSRIs epitomize this dynamic—massively overprescribed, frequently life-ruining, and nearly impossible to withdraw from—yet for decades, the industry successfully kept all criticism of them out of mainstream discourse.
Recently, efforts to connect SSRIs to mass shootings shifted the Overton window, making SSRI injuries gradually become acceptable to discuss, culminating in Secretary Kennedy recently holding a panel where victims shared devastating testimonies of what SSRIs had done to their lives.
Kennedy then announced a multiagency federal effort to combat inappropriate SSRI prescribing, train providers in how to correctly taper patients off antidepressants, and provide non-pharmaceutical alternatives—marking the first time in memory a federal health initiative has aimed to help get patients off a major drug class rather than on one.
Conversely, those who embrace the constant challenge of actually solving problems rather than managing them—in medicine and elsewhere—consistently find it is the most fulfilling way to practice, which is why Kennedy’s approach of giving physicians a supportive framework to break from the status quo holds so much promise.

When I was in high school, I observed a few discouraging events which led me to postulate: “no industry, organization or cause tasked with solving a problem will actually solve it because the problem disappearing threatens their economic livelihood or political power.” Since that time, I have observed more examples than I can count in so many different spheres that I’ve accepted this dynamic is a common feature of society, and likewise, have come across many similar observations by others, my favorite of which was:

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program—Milton Friedman

Recently two noteworthy examples of this principle came to my attention.

First, a frustrated patient shared with me they’d recently learned all of the online dating apps had switched from formats which allowed people to find suitable long term partners (e.g., with lengthy compatibility surveys) to ones which prevented people from matching because if someone found a good match on a platform, they would then stop paying more money for the service, whereas if they were hooked on it and spending hours each day trying to find someone, they would be a sustainable source of revenue. More remarkably, once one company figured out this approach made more money, they bought out all of their competitors (sometimes with threats of spurious lawsuits) and shifted them all over to this predatory model as well (all of which is detailed in these six articles¹^,²^,³^,⁴^,⁵^,⁶). I found this example noteworthy as:

One of the greatest sources of distress I find in patients (particularly now) are relationship challenges, particularly a lack of one, and I believe much of this traces back to apps taking over courtship.
Beyond the personal cost this dynamic creates, one of the largest challenges most developed countries are facing is a low birthrate which is primarily due to low marriage rates. My belief, in turn, is that many of the heavily contested policies we are seeing (e.g., reducing social support for the elderly, mass migration, or replacing workers with robots or AI) ultimately are due to the fact policy makers believe the declining birthrate means it will not be viable for the younger generation to support the society (particularly the elderly) so alternatives need to be found regardless of how objectionable they are.
A common cycle predatory industries in America follow is presenting a “superior” way to meet an essential need of humanity that replaces the traditional one that’s worked, then once the old one is completely displaced, tightening the screws with the new one (to milk as much out of the population as possible) until things are far worse than what preceded it and massive social cost is accrued (e.g., the Rockefellers did this in various ways with food, energy, and medicine).

Note: because online dating has now become so bad, the companies that monopolized the market are starting to lose a lot of users and money, signaling there may be a chance for this cycle to reset itself.

Second, a federal DOJ indictment recently charged the SPLC (one of the country’s leading civil rights groups that built its reputation fighting hate) with wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering. Prosecutors alleged it paid over $3 million in donor funds to informants embedded in white supremacist groups (including the KKK and National Alliance) while soliciting donations to “end hate,” and that one paid informant participated in planning chats, attended, and helped with logistics for the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. Many, in turn, were outraged about this, in part because of how much political capital was extracted from the event (e.g., Biden made opposing it a central justification for his 2020 presidential campaign and Harris to a lesser extent did so as well in 2024) but also because of just how much money it made:

Unfortunately, these are far from isolated examples, and it would be impossible for me to cover even a sliver of them here. As such, this article will focus on how this principle applies to medicine and why I believe beyond greed, complacency also plays a central role in the continual recurrence of this dynamic across societies.

Is Money The Root Of All Evil?

The origins of our faith and devotion to money have raised many questions throughout the ages. The love of money, in turn, has long been recognized as one of the most powerful forces for twisting human hearts towards evil (which often results in immense destruction to the people or the environment), while simultaneously, its value is often completely arbitrary—money gets printed and then assumes value because everyone holds a collective faith in it the ruling class controls us through. At the same time, money is a remarkable force for both developing and organizing society, and many of the things we depend upon are only available to us because of the economic system we live within.

When the question of money is looked at, it is often seen through a lens of greed being a deadly sin. However, I would argue the core issue is that for many people, effectively accumulating money becomes the foundational axiom (guiding principle) used to navigate life, causing them to rationalize a variety of unethical positions (they often lie about) to make money, because their internal algorithm will frequently default to the choice that acquires more money. Recognizing this, in turn, provides an invaluable tool for understanding the world around you, as the motivations of others often become far clearer once you cut through all their rhetoric and view things strictly through what they stand to profit from.

Algorithms of Business

In the same way that a default behavior to seek the most profitable choice helps to explain many of the individual actions we observe around us, businesses also follow a relatively predictable set of behaviors aimed at optimizing profit, which you can see in a wide range of industries.

In general, most large businesses aim for the following, prioritizing whichever are most feasible:

Continual growth
High markups on their product
The widest possible market
Market exclusivity (to protect and maximize sales)
Repeating sales far into the future

The main problem with this framework, which society largely applauds and equates with success, is that businesses routinely prioritize profit, even when it conflicts with the interests of customers or society. Because of this, we frequently see:

Artificial “needs” being created through marketing, making unnecessary products seem essential.
Harmful products (environmentally damaging or toxic to humans) being aggressively marketed and kept on the market despite the damage.
Extreme markups on essential products, pushing dependent customers closer to poverty.
Monopolies and exclusivity tactics used to block competing (and often better) solutions from entering the market.
Products deliberately designed for repeat purchases rather than full solutions, such as planned obsolescence or proprietary consumables (e.g., Gillette’s classic “razor-and-blades” sales model, and its modern equivalents like Amazon’s sinus irrigator that only works with its expensive proprietary pods that you quickly run out of).

The pharmaceutical industry, not surprisingly, excels in all of these, which helps to explain why they have managed to sustain steady growth for decades, and why one-fifth of all money spent in the United States goes to healthcare despite our country receiving very poor returns on that investment.

Note: annual adult vaccines (which frequently do nothing. particularly because they are often for the wrong strain) are an excellent example of an unsafe, unproven and ineffective product that is pushed on everyone because it fulfills the need for perpetually recurring sales.

Lifelong Patients

A frequently shared meme highlights that members of the medical community frequently face the same dilemma dating companies do.

The more time I’ve spent in medicine, the more I’ve come to appreciate that many principles you see in business are not only replicated in medicine but inevitably will guide medical practice. For example, much of modern medicine is only possible because it has successfully made the case it represents the “pinnacle of science” and that medical services are both essential and deserve a premium price far exceeding what anyone else has paid (which allows immense amounts of American money to be invested into creating medical infrastructure and developing new therapies).

At the same time, this creates an inherent conflict of interest for the entire profession, as if major disease categories are “solved,” the lobbying power (which the industry depends upon) is reduced, and funds allotted to treating or researching that condition dry up. Most importantly, the entire industry (and regulatory apparatus) is structured around this status quo, so anytime someone tries to deviate from it, countless stakeholders will emerge to oppose it.

This was best demonstrated by a 2018 report which provoked considerable public outrage when it was publicized by the mainstream media:

Note: while I can’t prove this, given how rarely the media will expose pharmaceutical misconduct, I believe the reason it did in this specific case was not to help the public but rather to send a message to the industry (and investors) to avoid curative genomic therapies.

All of this, I believe, helps explain why, while many competing therapies will always exist, the medical industry (and regulators) will only target the ones with the potential to scale up enough to meaningfully compete with their bottom line (e.g., we all saw what happened to the off-patent COVID-19 treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin). In contrast, there are many effective alternative therapies I know of which receive very little pushback from the industry because it will never be possible to deploy them at a scale which meaningfully threatens the industry’s bottom line.

That likewise touches upon a core dilemma I face writing this newsletter: many of the approaches we use (like neural therapy) which (often rapidly) get excellent results for patients are offered by very few physicians and require extensive training to administer optimally. As such, if I focus on them, it’s essentially useless information, as most readers will just feel frustrated they can’t access the therapy (or might end up with someone who does not correctly administer it to them). Likewise, there are many excellent therapies we sometimes use, but in very similar cases don’t, because their interactions with the body make them inherently unsuited for universal protocols (which is a big part of why I have not focused on cancer treatments here).

Because of this, I chose to discuss the therapies we use just enough so that when someone who is likely to benefit from them gets the opportunity to use them, they will be able to recognize the value of that opportunity, but I try to refrain from reaching the point where I feel I’m just wasting your time by telling you about something you won’t be able to use.

Conversely, I have put an immense degree of effort into presenting and accurately laying out how DMSO works, what it can treat and how to use it here because it’s very safe (and costs close to nothing), it has a very wide range of conditions it treats (including many “incurable” ones), and it’s effective enough that the majority of people who use it will experience significant benefit (which is why I’ve now received over 6,000 DMSO reports from readers and this newsletter has reached so many people).

However, despite the focus I’ve given to DMSO here, it’s not actually the primary thing we use in practice. Rather, prior to starting this project, my position was:

DMSO (especially IV DMSO) is life-changing for challenging neurological conditions, especially strokes (discussed here and here).
DMSO is an excellent first aid tool (e.g., for injuries or burns) that if possible should always be in your first aid kit.
DMSO is a significantly more effective and vastly safer NSAID (or Tylenol) alternative for treating tissue injuries and pain (discussed here) and one of the most potent anti-inflammatory options out there—which some patients really need (discussed here).
You can do a lot of really useful things by combining DMSO with another (typically natural) agent and applying it to the skin (discussed here and here).
DMSO is very helpful for herpes and one of the few ways you can reverse antibiotic resistance (discussed here).
DMSO has a lot of different therapeutic effects, most of which are similar to what many of our preferred therapies do. However, the key difference is that DMSO is more broad but less potent than them.

As such, DMSO was more of a “tool in the toolbox” I used when it made sense rather than my primary modality, and I was mostly just outraged it had not seen wider adoption for some of these uses (e.g., strokes or an ibuprofen alternative) since there is such a massive need to have better therapeutic options in those cases (making it be one of the clearest examples of FDA malfeasance, particularly since the FDA stonewalled it for decades despite extensive proof it worked, widespread public and scientific protest, and multiple Congressional hearings).

So, when I started this series, my goal was essentially to elucidate those six points, provide something beneficial everyone here could actually use without needing a difficult to find expert in the field, and try to put 3 months (or maybe 6) into it because I felt the subject had not been given the attention it deserved. Put differently, I never expected DMSO to be the focus of this newsletter or that years of my life would go into researching it (there are other therapies I planned to extensively discuss here). That essentially happened because:

•I saw that there was vastly more pertinent DMSO literature than I had initially imagined (much of which exists outside the databases AI systems use and hence is unlikely to ever be seen).

•From that I discovered DMSO excelled in certain conditions I had not previously known its value in, many of which otherwise are quite hard to treat (e.g., for the eyes and for the lungs).

•The efficacy readers were reporting for DMSO (across a broad swathe of ailments) was higher than what we’d seen since it was rarely the primary therapy we utilized.

•I realized DMSO (due to its ability to partially improve a variety of critical but immensely underappreciated aspects of health) provided an excellent vehicle for elucidating many of the concepts I’d wanted to cover.

•Due to the difficulty of this project and DMSO costing so little that no advertiser will make enough to fund promoting it, I realized it was unlikely anyone else would take the time to compile all the relevant information on DMSO, so it felt like I had an obligation to do the project.

Medical Sales Funnels

In many ways, addictive street drugs represent the purest distillation of the business framework I outlined earlier: it’s easy to continually expand the market by creating new addicts, once people are addicted they will do anything to get the drug (making it possible to sell at a high markup and ensure a large volume of repeating sales), and because it’s so profitable, funding is available to neutralize competitors (e.g., with cartel violence) so market exclusivity is maintained.

Conversely, this business model comes with a massive cost, as it not only removes its customers from productively contributing to society (as their lives are lost to addiction) but also disrupts the lives of those around them (e.g., through the crime needed to fund addictions, turf violence as rival groups compete for customers, and increasing corruption as they try to rope the government into supporting their enterprise). Because of this, for centuries this “ideal” business model has recurred across societies regardless of how harsh the measures governments take to stop it.

One of the most common critiques of the pharmaceutical industry is that the entire enterprise is a more sophisticated form of this model: the drugs that are widely sold are designed to hook people for life and the immense lobbying the industry can afford (so the government supports them) effectively takes the place of cartel violence to maintain their market monopoly.

Note: other common criticisms include several of the largest pharmaceutical companies (e.g., Bayer via IG Farben) having been deeply entwined with Nazi Germany, and that many major pharma firms were once leading marketers and manufacturers of cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin (Bayer famously marketed heroin as a “non-addictive” wonder drug).

Furthermore, unlike classic drug enterprises which have to market their products from the shadows, the state sanctioning of their business model makes it possible for them to publicly market the products to the entire society, acquire far more customers than an illegal enterprise ever could, and buy out both the media and government so criticisms of their products are not allowed to be aired.

Seeking to maximize profit, the industry hence seeks out “blockbuster” drugs and feeds each one into their robust sales apparatus. For this model to work, as the Goldman Sachs memo illustrates, the drugs need to be taken perpetually so curative ones that are taken briefly are not permissible.

Note: a significant amount of the research I cite in this newsletter originates from less wealthy countries with robust scientific infrastructure (e.g., Russia). I believe this is because those countries cannot afford to subsidize costly perpetual medical care, and hence are motivated to explore less costly options that can cure illnesses and require far fewer administrations.

Fittingly, the medical profession has largely moved away from the language of “cure.” For centuries, major medical dictionaries—including the Oxford Concise Medical Dictionary, Bantam Medical Dictionary, and Barron’s Dictionary of Medical Terms—either omitted a clear definition of “cure” or defined it only minimally.¹² The word is also notably absent from the indexes of core references such as Merck’s Manual and Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine.¹² In practice, physicians are strongly discouraged from promising or even declaring a “cure” in many contexts, particularly for chronic conditions. You cannot be accused of failing to achieve something the profession rarely claims is possible.

Note: while this linguistic caution is understandable as it helps protect patients from false hope and physicians from liability when relapses occur, it simultaneously fosters a toxic cultural mindset in which “managing” chronic conditions becomes the ceiling rather than the floor, discouraging both doctors and patients from diligently pursuing root-cause resolution or promising alternative therapies.

Because of this, every successful pharmaceutical lies somewhere along a spectrum of being “addictive” to “ineffective.” Much of this results from the fact the body is designed to maintain homeostasis and resist unnatural alterations of physiology, so since most drugs work by inhibiting an enzyme, inhibiting a receptor, or stimulating a receptor, the body will counteract this by creating the opposite effect. As such, the human response to medications is frequently either:

•For the effect to be temporary and only last as long as medication is there

•For progressively higher doses of the medication to be required to elicit the same effect

•For the body to shift to an unnatural baseline where it can no longer function without the artificial counterweight of the medication (which in many cases equates to a chemical dependency and addiction to the drug because of how severe the withdrawals are).

Note: sometimes additional steps are involved. For example, acid reflux frequently results from a lack of stomach acid (which prevents the top of the stomach from getting the signal to close) which argues for supplementing meals with stomach acid (that beyond frequently curing reflux, provides numerous other health benefits). However rather than do this, the preferred approach is to completely suppress stomach acid production so nothing is there to reflux, making it very difficult to stop the medications because once small (insufficient) amounts of acid return, they will reflux and cause heart burn.

Since this business model is so reliable, my view is that it’s inevitable more products than I can count will emerge to support it and it’s an exercise in futility to stop it. Because of that, my focus has been directed to three areas:

•Identifying the (typically non-addictive) pharmaceutical drugs which I nonetheless think make a lot of sense to use in certain contexts.

•Finding better alternatives to the commonly marketed drugs.

•Directing my energy towards opposing the most harmful (rather than useless) medications.

Sadly, despite restricting my focus to the last category, there’s simply no shortage, as beyond the design of pharmaceutical drugs inevitably producing side effects (due to some of the functions they suppress being essential for health), those side effects are often actually an upside for the industry because they create additional problems that require other drugs to treat, hence creating a robust “sales funnel.”

“Sales funnels” for context, are a classic marketing concept: cast a wide net with a low cost (or free) product with a high rate of conversion, pull a certain number of those caught into buying a more expensive product, and then in each successive funnel, get a smaller number of people to buy an even more expensive option.

When observing medicine, I hence cannot help but notice just how many things in it are effectively sales funnels (e.g., general practitioners not only function to provide a steady stream of patient referrals to the more expensive medical services, but also, for “wellness” give patients a large number of tests that convert a significant number of patients into taking the common lifelong drugs which half of American adults are on at least one of).

SSRI Antidepressants

From the start, I decided to focus on SSRIs as while they significantly help a subset of patients, I also feel they are one of the worst offenders on the market. Beyond being massively overprescribed, they frequently ruin people’s lives (often in very cruel ways), are often nearly impossible to withdraw from, and have predatory sales funnels that affect large numbers of American women:

Unfortunately, SSRIs languished in the same place many other toxic drugs did: they harmed a significant number of people but the drugs made enough money (one in six adults take psychiatric medications) that it was possible for industry to corral the entire government and media into sweeping them under the rug, so this issue remained largely unknown outside of those affected by them (whereas with the COVID vaccines, we finally crossed the threshold where so many people were injured it simply was at last not possible to sweep everything under rug).

To try to shift this, I decided to focus not on the common side effects of the drugs (which are easy to ignore if you aren’t directly affected by it), but rather the psychotic violence and mass shootings they occasionally cause. A very strong case existed for this, but up to that point, all the supporting literature for it was either in dense books most people were unlikely to read (e.g., Peter Gøtzsche’s Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial) or in news articles which only presented slices of the evidence and did so in an excessively sensationalistic manner unlikely to persuade a neutral reader.

My theory, was that since so much effort has gone into politicizing mass shootings and the ensuing arguments over gun control, the right (segments of which already identified with using fewer psychiatric medications than the left) would be very receptive to the fact SSRIs were triggering many of the shootings being blamed on inadequate gun control. Furthermore, my hope was that once this position was adopted, it would spur an interest by its proponents (e.g., political commentators) into finally looking at all the other far more common side effects SSRIs cause and make enough people talk about them that it was finally an acceptable topic of discourse (as previously, much like vaccines, beyond being ridiculed for believing SSRIs were dangerous, you would also be chastised for hurting patients by reducing their access to these “life-saving” medications).

So, I tried to draft a very clear case for this (along with a follow up explaining the dangers of SSRIs and the corruption that allowed them to come to market) and then (at a time when this newsletter was much smaller) put them out immediately following a school shooting which was large enough to become the national media story. That article¹^,²^,³ somehow made it to Tucker Carlson, who then, five weeks later, for the first time in the mainstream media, did a segment on the topic for Fox News:

Following this, as more and more political figures on the right were willing to broach the subject, it became a gradually acceptable topic to discuss (e.g., during his 2024 campaign, RFK Jr. shared a thread on the article I wrote stating: “Any conversation about gun violence is incomplete if it doesn’t touch on mental health and the suppressed evidence implicating SSRIs in suicide and homicide”).

Likewise, the successive attention which bubbled up in the alternative media to the frequent side effects of SSRIs (and Secretary Kennedy’s public acknowledgment of it) has gradually brought mainstream attention to this, including at a recent May 4^th panel (covered by the press) which began with victims of SSRIs sharing what they (like many others) have experienced:

Note: Lauren’s story (beginning at 17:00), went viral online due to many being understandably shocked SSRIs could take away your ability to have sex or emotionally connect with your partner.

The panel then concluded with Secretary Kennedy stating we need to do better, that withdrawing from SSRIs is significantly more difficult than withdrawing from heroin, and announcing that the Federal Government would begin combatting this. He laid out a multiagency national effort to do so which will educate health care providers across the country in the dangers of SSRIs (particularly inappropriate prescribing—which is one of the largest issues with SSRIs), provide non-pharmaceutical mental health alternatives, and train providers in how to correctly taper off antidepressants (along with reimbursing them for doing this).

Note: the full panel can be viewed here and here. Additionally, SSRIs are not the only psychiatric with major issues (e.g., last week immediately before this panel I wrote about the many serious issues with benzodiazepines and treating anxiety and at some point I intend to cover the equally problematic antipsychotics).

Despite everything I’ve seen happen over the last four years, I still never believed something like this would happen. For context, in a period when the pharmaceutical industry had much less influence over the FDA, it took more than a decade of activism, leaks and Congressional hearings to simply get a warning label on SSRIs that they could cause suicide. This hence went miles beyond anything even the most optimistic activists had ever imagined could be possible, illustrating why it is so critical to shift the Overton window and make taboo subjects acceptable for regular discussion.

Additionally, it was quite notable that this entire effort goes contrary to the entire foundation of the medical system, as Secretary Kennedy’s ultimate goal was to decrease rather than increase pharmaceutical sales. As such, predictable criticisms of his completely reasonable approach emerged, such as this one from Senator Tina Smith (D-MN):

People I care a whole lot about rely on SSRIs to make their lives work. I don’t know where I would be without SSRIs. RFK Jr. can get his fucking hands and crazy conspiracy theories out of our medicine cabinets”

Protective reactions like these are inevitable, and illustrate precisely why this issue has taken so long to gain traction. But rather than wait for the system to reform itself, my approach has always been to focus on what I can actually offer patients right now.

The Natural Approach to Medicine

Throughout my career, I have tried to prioritize natural therapies, in part because they are often more effective for addressing root causes of illness, but more so, because they simply have less toxicity so you are much less likely to injure people with them. This, essentially, is why, much in the same way I do not critique mediocre drugs I feel provide minimal benefits, I have not focused on many of the same unscrupulous dynamics I’ve highlighted throughout this article existing within the natural medicine field (e.g., many marginal products are widely pushed simply because they have large profit margins, and a lot of the drama in the health freedom movement over the last few years has ultimately originated from competing parties trying to sink their competitors so they can monopolize sales to this newly created market).

Note: one of the most disillusioning things for me when I entered the natural medicine field was meeting well-known male holistic doctors who rallied against the egregious conduct of the pharmaceutical industry or doctors in general, that then did many of the same things they’d described to their own patients to maximize revenue. From this, I gradually concluded that the more aggressively and audaciously people promoted themselves, the more likely they were to be dishonest.

In my own case, much of my own medical philosophy essentially boils down to:

•Safety is more important than efficacy (so I am very hesitant to use therapies I think have potential risks, and will back off much earlier than others when I see adverse reactions emerge), which in most cases I believe is all-around correct, but simultaneously not appropriate in acute settings (where some degree of harm is often required to save someone’s life).

•If you have to perpetually give someone a therapy, it probably means you are not treating the disease correctly (or only treating the periphery of it), so in those instances (outside of ones where no viable alternative exists such as replacing a critical hormone the body can no longer produce), the focus should always come back to figuring out how to address the underlying illness (which often requires untangling some type of complex connected web in the body or the body, mind, and spirit).

•People frequently develop tolerances or sensitivities to therapies, so if something does work, you only want to use it when it’s clearly needed to avoid being caught in a situation where it doesn’t work when it’s really needed.

As you can imagine, these beliefs aren’t particularly common as they go against the sales focused mindset of the medical industry.

Since I receive many questions on this topic, I’d like to briefly illustrate how these principles intersect with DMSO.

First, many diseases (particularly degenerative neurological ones) essentially follow this progression:

1. Something pathologic is present in the body.

2. It repeatedly injures the body (e.g., the nervous system).

3. Over time, tissue damage (or tissues being stuck in a shocked state) accumulates, and the function of the tissue is gradually compromised.

4. The tissue damage creates functional impairments the individual notices and wants addressed.

Typically, the earlier in that chain you can affect the process, the closer you get to treating the “root cause” of the illness (whereas if you only treat stage 4, which is what many pharmaceutical drugs do—in part due to their design and in part because stage 4 shifts are the easiest to quantify with conventional research), all you accomplish is reducing symptoms and needing to take the drug in perpetuity. Conversely, while treating stage 1 is ideal, it isn’t always possible to do, and in many cases, even if you do, the existing damage is still there.

Since DMSO essentially does a lot of different things many other therapies I routinely use do, but much less potently, it frequently addresses multiple of the above stages without being strong enough to cause a significant reaction, which is essentially why DMSO can frequently fix a wide range of complex illnesses without requiring as much precise targeting by a skilled clinician. Conversely, its ability to do each one varies, with it typically being the least effective at addressing stage 1.

Because of this, for example, we long believed that DMSO could not cure ALS, but as it seemed to help counteract stage 2, it could prevent the progression of the disease, making it a far from ideal option for the disease (but nonetheless still a dramatic improvement over what they could otherwise expect and thus justifiable). I hence was quite surprised to receive reports like this where the reader reported DMSO reversed their ALS (allowing them to regain strength and mobility that had been gone for years) and concluded that the symptoms returning once he stopped DMSO indicated it was addressing stages 2, 3, and 4 for him (discussed further here)

Likewise, when someone else reached out to share their gratitude for me publishing the DMSO series because high oral doses was what finally gave him the ability to walk (due to severe arthritis in one joint on each side), my response was: “if you’ve taken that much DMSO for a year and it has not permanently fixed the issue, you need to look into the root cause, and given what’s going on, I would do either this or this.”

Note: in his case, while I disagreed with perpetually treating the issue with DMSO, it’s also important to acknowledge the only option most people in those circumstances would have is to perpetually take an NSAID, which would be both significantly less effective and expose them to a real risk of a serious complication (prior to the COVID vaccines, NSAIDs were the arguably deadliest pharmaceutical drug in America due to all the gastric bleeds and kidney injuries they cause). So while I would prefer a different approach, compared to the standard options, DMSO management was a miracle.

I mention all of this because one of the most common questions I receive from readers is if they can take DMSO perpetually because of how good it is for you. My answer, in turn, has always been:

“If you can’t trace a clear benefit to taking it (or are at high risk of a condition it prevents), I would not take it perpetually. This is partly because I am philosophically opposed to that approach to medicine, partly because one segment of the DMSO community believes longterm use stresses the liver as the liver detoxifies it (although to the best of my knowledge no data corroborates this—while in contrast liver failure has been cured with DMSO), and partly because in chronic pain, if break days aren’t periodically used, it can lose its effectiveness. That said, there are people who’ve taken it daily for 30 years and reported no issues from doing so, but ultimately the data to solidly answer if this is helpful or harmful will likely never be collected.”

Institutional Inertia

Most societies and institutions follow a similar trajectory: initially, they are the underdogs and have to be as innovative, flexible, and dedicated as possible to establish themselves. However, once they do, their focus shifts to maintaining their newfound position rather than advancing their original mission, and in many cases, this eventually leads to decadence, decay, and collapse (e.g., empires throughout history typically last seven generations because they all succumb to this cycle—a process which is initiated by members of the newly prosperous society collectively shifting their focus from advancing the national interest to finding ways to make as much money as possible for themselves and then once the wealth is accumulated, everyone aimlessly drifting into intellectualism, then decadence and then a societal collapse).

Likewise, whenever an industry or organization becomes assigned to addressing an issue, while bold strides are initially taken, the focus gradually shifts to protecting the institution and maintaining the status quo. For example I’ve never forgotten one clip from a documentary about soldiers who were injured by the (completely unnecessary) experimental anthrax vaccine, which much like the COVID vaccine, ended the careers of many promising soldiers despite widespread resistance against the shots.

Often times you find that people will protect the institution rather than disclose the truth. And as long as the institution stays intact, they’re protected.

Note: a documentary was recently made by CHD exposing the similar (illegal) travesty that happened to our military with the COVID-19 vaccines. I was requested to help promote it so enough people can attend the initial screening for it to make the impact they are hoping for. If this is an issue that is important to you, a trailer for the film and information on purchasing tickets can be found here.

This shift in focus commonly translates to the goal moving from solving the issue to providing an “indispensable service” by perpetually managing rather than fixing it (much in the same way many patients are perpetually treated with medications that cause increasingly severe side effects as they age).

As this process has occurred throughout history, it typically is attributed to financial incentives. For example, despite countless attempts over the decades, government contractors are notorious for overcharging and underdelivering on projects they’re paid to do, with California’s high speed rail being one of the most well known examples (which after more than 30 years of work and 15 billion spent, has only assembled 59 train bridges, not laid any track, and now is estimated will cost 4-7x what was promised when the funding was secured by a 2008 ballot initiative).

Because of this, many believe that spending more money on things (which desperately need help) can actually be counterproductive, as it incentivizes the responsible party to switch their focus to securing funding and planning spending rather than garnering results. Sadly, beyond government spending, this principle encapsulates why it is so difficult to find authentic charities to donate to (both within medicine and outside of it). Likewise, it illustrates why monopolies are so problematic in medicine, as it is only with real competition that the medical system will be motivated to find treatments which actually help their patients.

Note: government contracts pay for results upfront so that money can be saved all around by contractors not needing to secure more costly bank financing. I’ve long believed that if this model were switched (contractors were only paid upon successful completion of the contract), while there might be a small increase in overall costs and exclusion of some smaller contractors, this would be counterbalanced by far greater savings from contracts actually being completed for the original price promised. While nothing this extreme has been done, this week, the military announced unprecedented changes to how defense contracts will be procured¹^,²which essentially implements parts of that (along with providing the peripheral support it needs to work), something I am hopeful might for the first time in my life curb America’s immense military spending.

Conclusion

While financial incentives are the most obvious driver for institutions to abandon their original mission, from having repeatedly observed how this plays out inside institutions, I (and many others throughout history) have come to believe that plain human complacency and the widespread aversion to change play an equally central (and perhaps even larger) role. Most people would simply rather master a comfortable routine and get paid for it than face the constant uncertainty required to actually solve difficult problems, and once an organization passes its trying founding phase, its culture naturally selects for those people over genuine problem-solvers who disrupt its order.

What then is the antidote to all of this?

When I was much younger, mirroring what I read in spiritual texts, I saw many instances of people who were or became wealthy being far less happy than their less fortunate peers and realized that money without purpose was not only devoid of meaning, but often spiritual poison as one’s life purpose inevitably would warp to revolve around accumulating ever increasing amounts of money or status (along with all the effort it took to maintain) because they believed the happiness and contentment they could never find could be obtained with even more wealth.

Repeatedly observing this dynamic, I concluded that my purpose would be to learn as much about life as I could, and along that journey, find ways to help others, as while I was not born into a prosperous family, knowing what life was like in many places outside America, I felt immensely fortunate for where I had nonetheless ended up and that I had a spiritual obligation to pay that forward.

Because of this mindset, I would always seek out new and challenging problems to solve, and before long gravitated towards medicine because very few things are as complex as the human body (or as meaningful for others when you can finally figure something out and help heal someone). I was hence quite shocked to discover not only that inquisitive medical students were the minority, but more so, that the entire educational process was structured to gradually remove that mindset from trainees, and just how many of the doctors I trained under both had extremely repetitive practices (which to me would be unbearable) and were less than happy about their life, yet unwilling to consider different ways to manage their patients even when it was clear their approach did not work and a (not too controversial) alternative was offered to them.

I’ve hence long wondered what the solution is to all of this. On one hand, I hold the idealistic perspective that if people are presented with a better way to practice medicine, supported in enacting it, and shown that they can find the passion for medicine they had long ago lost, they would eagerly embrace it (as I’ve seen more physicians than I count in those circumstances do so). Conversely, from watching attempt after attempt to reform the medical system at many different scales fail (and seeing how effectively any entrenched industry will resist change unless a disruptive force emerges and rapidly eliminates the entire sector), I’ve adopted the more cynical perspective that medicine will only change if it faces genuine disruptive competition.

RFK’s approach on mental health hence offers an intriguing third (hybrid) option; provide physicians with a safe, supportive and guided framework to break from the existing mold and practice, while simultaneously rekindling their interest in medicine by seeing the results this previously unconventional approach creates.

It’s hard to describe how much joy this brings me, not only because it offers a better path forward for medicine in general, but also because so many people I was close to have had their lives ruined by SSRIs, and (even at the time I wrote the original mass shooting article), it always felt like there was so much inertia behind the drugs that it would be impossible to ever shift that. I hence want to deeply thank each of you for what you’ve done to create the current unprecedented climate we are in and for your help in supporting this newsletter that has allowed a lot of deeply meaningful things I never thought could happen to happen.

Lastly, I’ve been hard at work over the last two weeks on the second part of the neurology series (spinal injuries, peripheral nerve issues, and how many of DMSO’s therapeutic effects are mediated by the shifts it creates within the liquid crystalline water throughout the body—something you can to some extent see if you look carefully as DMSO mixes with water). I’m presently starting the first draft of the final section (neuropathic pain), so in theory it should be done by Saturday and going forward, most of the remaining ones should be easier to write as the densest topics and mechanisms will now have been covered.

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When the Persian Gulf Supply Shock Meets the Warsh Fed: Stagflation and the Coming AI Bubble Bust

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:23:28 GMT

by David Stockman

Here is a salient place to start regarding the economic impact of the Donald’s misbegotten war on Iran: To wit, approximately 7 billion ton-miles of freight moves by truck each and every day in the USA, which heavy truck fleet consumes upwards of 2.9 million barrels per day (mb/d) of diesel fuel.

Alas, the price of diesel fuel was about $3.55/gallon both a year ago and as of early January 2026, but has since soared by more than+$2.00 per gallon to around $5.60 recently. That’s a 56% rise in the cost of pumping goods and commodities through the arteries of the US economy. On an annualized basis, the diesel fuel bill for the US truck fleet went from $155 billion per year to $250 billion per year at current oil prices.

The big question, of course, is through which channel these drastically higher fuel acquisition costs will be absorbed—in higher prices or reduced output?

And that pertains not just to the microcosm of the trucking sector, but the entire GDP now being battered by the Donald’s elective war-based dislocation of the world’s 175 million BOE/day oil and natural gas markets.

We’d bet it will be a combination of both inflation and deflation, otherwise known as stagflation. The mix of these outcomes depends upon supply and demand conditions in individual sectors of the economy in part, but also, and ultimately and more importantly, on the Fed.

That is, whether the nation’s central bank pumps incremental demand into the economy via credit expansion with a view to “accommodating” the soaring price of energy today, and, soon, food and other commodity inputs to GDP, too; or holds firm on the printing press dials and allows the now cresting energy and commodity shocks to work their way through the interstices of the $30 trillion US economy.

Of course, during the previous comparable petroleum supply disruption of the 1970s, the Fed made the huge mistake of printing the money to counteract what was a “supply shock” in the form of soaring petroleum prices. But that led—just as sound money advocates had always held—to double digit increases in the general price level by the end of the decade, and thereafter the trauma of the Volcker administered application of the monetary brakes.

With the Fed fixing to welcome a new Chairman, as recent congressional hearings remind, it is therefore a question of whether or not the Kevin Warsh Fed will want to take its place in the monetary policy villains gallery along with Arthur Burns and the hapless William G. Miller.

We think not. We actually believe that for the first time since Volcker we are about to get a Fed chairman who understands the requisites of sound money and noninflationary finance, as well as the profound error of Keynesian demand management at the central bank.

And not only that. As far as we can tell, he also has the experience from his prior service on the Fed during the so-called Great Financial Crisis and the cajones to lean heavily against the supply shock now emanating from the Persian Gulf.

Of course, in a perfect world of honest money and free markets—including in the production of money and credit—there wouldn’t be any central bank “leaning” to do. Under an honest gold standard, for instance, the impending petroleum supply shock would cause relative price changes, thereby generating a sharp curtailment of activity in petroleum intensive sectors and the reallocation of activity, output, jobs and capital to less petroleum intensive sectors. That’s what the miracle of free markets do when they are allowed by the state to operate.

We obviously do not have anything close to free money and capital markets today. Yet we may be lucking out with the arrival of a new Fed Chairman who might well attempt to stand up a sound money proxy—at least in part—to simulate the deflationary and re-allocative impulses that would otherwise arise in the face of a world scale supply shock.

That is to say, Warsh may permit the incoming Persian Gulf supply shock to curtail output in heavily impacted sectors rather than monetize it, as did his failed predecessors during the 1970s.

Moreover, one thing which may help Walsh lean in this anti-Keynesian direction is the the need to avoid the tattered legacy of the private equity deal lawyer who proceeded him. As it happened, Powell had no clue that the blue suits who soon surrounded him at the Eccles Building were wrong-headed Keynesian monetary statists through and though.

Accordingly, when the far smaller supply shock from the Black Sea dislocation at the on-set of the Russia-Ukraine War came cascading through the global energy and food commodity markets, Powell joined the Burns/Miller brigade and kept on “accommodating”.

That’s evident in the graph below, which depicts the domestic services inflation rate excluding energy.

This is the Fed’s go to inflation metric because it arguably measures a subset of prices in the US economy that are mainly driven by so-called domestic “demand”, which is the very thing the Fed claims to be expert at calibrating.

We think Fed “demand management” is pretty much mischievous nonsense.

The fact is, however, when the Ukraine War incepted in February 2022 the domestic services less energy index was already rising at a 4.1% Y/Y rate. So there was no room for “accommodation” at all.

In fact, the Ukraine War supply shock had caught the Fed with its monetary pants down. The Fed funds rate was effectively zero in nominal terms at the time (February 2022) and had been pinned to the zero bound for the previous 22 months. Thereafter Powell and his merry band of money printers kept kidding themselves into believing that the Ukrainian War inflation surge was “transitory” and that a Volcker style slamming of the monetary brakes was unnecessary.

As it evident in the chart, however, the Fed tepid 25 basis point increases month after month in its target funds rate was blatantly too little and way too late. By February 2023, the very inflation metric that the Keynesian central bankers claim to heavily influence—-domestic services less energy services—was leaping higher at a +7.3% Y/Y rate.

By then, of course, and with double digit energy and food inflation layered on top, headline inflation was running at 40-year highs and knocking on the door of 1970s style double digit inflation.

We think this history is profoundly relevant to where a Kevin Warsh-led Fed may come out because it just so happens that the the Y/Y rate on this key metric stood at +3.05% in March 2026 or about where it had been in October 2021 on the eve of the “Powell Inflation”.

Needless to say, we don’t think Kevin Warsh, who is a real student of money and economics, wishes to be placed next in line in the Burns/Miller/Powell gallery of monetary villains.

CPI For Services Less Energy Services, June 2021 to March 2026

That’s especially the case when you look at the history of the Fed’s so-called monetary target adjusted for the prevailing (Y/Y) inflation rate. To wit, there is no logical or sustainable world in which the inflation-adjusted or “real” cost of overnight money can be negative for any even limited period of time.

That’s because negative cost overnight money in real terms is truly the mother’s milk of speculation—especially on Wall Street among the hedge funds and fast money operators, but on the main street economy, too.

Stated differently, cheap money everywhere and always causes excessive speculation, imprudent leverage, debt accumulation, financial asset bubbles, malinvestment of capital and economic waste. But above all else, it also fuels an inflationary rise in the general price level owing to artificial credit-fueled demand uncoupled from any prior and corresponding increase in supply.

In this context, the chart below tells you all you need to know about what the Warsh Fed will be up against, and also the lessons of the 2022-2023 error committed by the Fed in its delayed and languid reaction to the Black Sea commodity shock. To wit, the inflation-adjusted Fed funds rate in Q2 2022 when measured by the inflation metric the Fed swears by—the domestic services CPI less energy services—was negative -4.4%.

Surely that was a signal that the money-printers were way over the end of their skis. That’s especially because the Fed funds rate had been negative in real terms for 57 quarters running, going all the way back to Q1 2008, when the real funds rate had last been slightly positive.

But here’s where the inflationary gale force was gestated. It actually took the Fed more than three years—until Q2 2025—to get the Fed funds rate positive in real terms, and then only marginally so at just +0.75%. Indeed, it is nothing less than the big pool of negative real cost credit enabled by the Fed during those three years that rocked the US economy with an inflationary outbreak that is still not fully extinguished.

In fact, as the US economy now begins to absorb the far more powerful supply shock waves from the Persian Gulf supply shock, we think the incoming Warsh Fed is not about to run a repeat of 2021-2022.

The more likely course is actually suggested by the left-hand side of the graph, which shows that the real funds rate measured with this metric hovered in the +2.5% range or higher during the salad days of non-inflationary growth of the 1980s and 1990s.

That is to say, Kevin Warsh is likely to prove to be more of a Volcker/Reagan sound money central banker than we have experienced since Alan Greenspan sold his gold standard bona fides for a stint as the world’s most famous money-printer after the dotcom crash.

Inflation-Adjusted Fed Funds Rate, 1982 to 2026

So the question recurs. What is likely to happen to the alleged Trumpian Golden Age when the Persian Gulf Supply shock smacks up against the incoming sounder money Fed under Kevin Warsh?

In a word, we think the US economy is already teetering on the edge of recession, waiting for the proverbial wing-flap to tip it over into contraction. After all, it’s already evident that the one bright spot in the US economy during the Donald’s second go round—capital spending—is purely an artifact of the stock market bubble in AI.

For want of doubt, the table below shows Capex spending for AI and data centers and compares it to the second column, which is the standard measure of business fixed investment in structures, equipment and intellectual capital as reported in the income and product accounts. It is notable that the former accounted for just 2.5% of business capital investment in 2020, but grew by $188 billion in 2025 versus prior year.

At the same time, total business investment rose by just $228 billion in 2025, meaning that the AI/data center boom accounted for fully 82% of total business investment spending growth in the US economy during 2025.

The final two columns show the same data in constant dollar terms. Whereas the reported data shows that real nonresidential fixed investment investment (fifth column) rose by a seemingly robust 4.1% during Trump’s first year, capital spending excluding the AI bubble actually shrank at a -0.4% annual rate.

As it happened, the latter had actually grown by 6.7% per annum during the time of Sleepy Joe (2020-2024) owing to the unsustainable stimulus of borrow, spend and print after the pandemic collapse in the spring of 2020.

So “Joe Biden” therefore gets no plaudits for the artificially bloated economy he inherited from Trump 45 and the money-printing excesses of the Powell Fed. Still, it can be well and truly said that the US economy was already positioned on a banana peel when the Donald elected to blow up the Persian Gulf for no good reason of homeland security.

Business CapEx With And Without The AI/Data Center Boom, 2020 to 2025

In short, the Persian Gulf supply shock is about to monkey-hammer the US economy good and hard. And then the AI bubble in the stock market will bust—even as this time there will be no money-printers at the central bank waiting to bailout the mess.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

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Catherine Austin Fitts: “The Government Isn’t in Charge—The President Is Doing What He’s Told”

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:22:25 GMT

by Lioness of Judah Ministry

Catherine Austin Fitts argues that soaring deficits and inconsistent policy decisions point to a deeper reality: elected officials may not be in control.

Drawing on the gap between public messaging and actual outcomes, she questions who is truly directing policy.

In her view, the visible leadership operates within constraints set by more powerful financial forces behind the scenes.

The result is a system that appears chaotic on the surface, but may be more coordinated than it looks.

Source: Sense Receptor

Former Assistant Secretary of HUD Catherine Austin Fitts: “The current administration [doesn’t] have agency.” “It’s clear the president is basically doing what he’s told.” “Behind [the administration]... [is] the Deep State. [I.e.,] the central bankers.”

This clip of Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, investment banker, and founder of the Solari Report , is taken from a discussion posted to the Freedom Research YouTube channel on April 20, 2026.

Partial transcription of clip

“The current administration has 6 to $7 trillion a year of expenses and $4 trillion of revenues. So they have a deficit of $2 to $3 trillion a year, and the debt is skyrocketing. Do you think they’re in control?

“Okay, so they don’t have agency. Right. And, there’s all sorts of questions about how exactly they get their orders and how it works. But, you know, they are functioning in a world where they don’t have control. And it’s clear, you know, it’s clear that the president is basically doing what he’s told.

“And the question is, who’s telling him and how does that message get delivered? So you kind of have this show in front where a group of people look and act like they’re running things, but, you know, and it looks discombobulated because they’re constantly saying one thing and doing another and whatever.

“And then behind it, you have a group of people who, in my experience, are pretty competent and are making it clear this is how we’re going to go. And some people refer to that as Deep State. I, usually refer to that as the central bankers. It’s oversimplified.

“But the system wants to implement a control grid, and it can’t do it without cutting off the leakage. And I suspect that’s a big part of what is happening is about.”

Full Video

The former U.S. official claims decades of missing money may have funded something far bigger — a parallel system, a global reset, and what she calls a “breakaway civilization.”

SHOCKING: Catherine Austin Fitts Says the Federal Government—Namely DoD—Has Stolen $55 TRILLION of Taxpayer Funds

Exposing The Darkness

SHOCKING: Catherine Austin Fitts Says the Federal Government—Namely DoD—Has Stolen $55 TRILLION of Taxpayer Funds

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a month ago · 174 likes · 33 comments · Lioness of Judah Ministry

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Shawn Ryan - Etienne de la Boetie2 Debate Challenge Update

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Tue, 12 May 2026 10:03:19 GMT

So I am rolling through Nashville, where Shawn Ryan’s studio is, next week on the way to my son’s college graduation and the following week on the way back. I had sent Shawn Ryan’s team an invitation to debate the legitimacy of “government” and the fact that the organized crime “government” is using unethically manipulative tricks and techniques to create “order-followers” (Soul-diers) willing to set their morality aside and kill whomever they are told while living off money stolen from others at the point of a gun. He or his team have not responded so I wanted to double down and make it clear I am calling him out.

Shawn Ryan swore an oath to defend the Con-stitution from “All Enemies Foreign and Domestic.” Here I am, the biggest “Enemy of the Con-stitution” since Lysander Spooner and I am about to figurative walk right past Shawn Ryan the same way the German soldier walked past the cowardly American soldier in the movie Saving Private Ryan.

I’ve got almost 10,000 hard copy book sales to 25+ countries, almost 50,000 book downloads, and I appear on dozens of podcast and radio shows each year pointing out the scam of the Con-stitution and “government:”

“We the People” can’t delegate rights they don’t have themselves (stealing/extorting money (taxes), making up rules for everyone, etc.) to a “representative” or a “government” to “represent them” doing something they don’t have the ability to do themselves.
You can’t be bound by a social contract you didn’t sign.
“Democracy” has the same moral legitimacy as a lynching or a gang rape.

The Con-stitition was either:

A Scam from the beginning - Imposing an easily rigged system being used to rob and control the population for the banks that is stealing $2.7 MILLION dollars from the average worker.
The DUMBEST Idea Ever - We can give a ruling class a monopoly on violence and rule making using an easily rigged system and think they are going to be restrained by what George Bush Jr. Called a “God-Damned Piece of Paper”
1. Reminder: The Con-stitition has completely failed to protect even the basic natural law rights outlined in the Bill of Rights AND hasn’t been able to limit “government” AT ALL… AND has been the system that, along with the Fractional Reserve Banking it makes “legal,” robs the average American of $2.7 MILLION dollars in inflation, taxes, and Social Security underpayments over a 40-year career and 20-year retirement.

So…

I am either wrong - and Shawn Ryan should put me in my place and defend the Constitution. After all, if he isn’t willing to defend it with words then why would anyone think he would have the courage to defend it with arms??
I am right - He should help me expose the Biggest Scam in History that has been robbing his friends, family and colleagues for MILLIONS in inflation, taxes, and Social Security underpayments. Help get the military and veterans pointed in the right direction: Against the organized crime system in Washington DC and New York.

Why am I picking on Shawn Ryan?

Shawn appears to be one of DOZENS of “ex” CIA and/or intelligence agency operatives being given world-class sets, producers, social media teams, etc. to dominate the REAL battlefield: Control-of-Perception.. Can they trick you into thinking the “government” is legitimate, the military is heroic, and our wars are just.

The program is part of what we call “The Brute Force Manufactured Consensus”

Many “Ex” CIA employees (and other intelligence agency and MIC operatives) appear to be funded for congressional campaigns where they are then artificially promoted to become part of 200-300ish people who get to talk about politics and current events on the control-of-perception media…

CIA-connected JD Vance was BOTH a CIA-connected media commentator on CNN and CIA-connected elected official whose career and Senate campaign were both funded by CIA contractor Peter Thiel. Thiel funded his Senate campaign with $15 million dollars.

Are the intelligence agencies turning the knobs on CIA-connected Google, YouTube, Facebook, and X the same way they turned the knobs for JD Vance?

So I am going to be driving past Shawn Ryan in Nashville, TN on Monday, May 11th and then when I drive back on Monday OR Tuesday, May 18th or 19th. It will be interesting to see if Shawn accepts my challenge to debate…

OR lets me drive right by…

About The Author & Challenger

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.

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The FCC Wants Your ID Before You Get a Phone Number

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:18:14 GMT

by The Free Thought Project

(Reclaim The Net) The era of the anonymous phone number could be ending. On April 30, the Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved a proposal requiring telecom providers to verify customers’ identities before activating service.

Government-issued ID, physical address, legal name, and existing phone numbers would all be included. The stated goal is stopping robocalls. The result would be an identity-verification regime covering one of the last semi-anonymous communication tools available to ordinary Americans.

The proposal applies to nearly every voice provider in the country, from traditional carriers and mobile operators to VoIP services. The FCC is seeking public comment on specifics, but the direction is clear.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr framed it around negligent carriers. “As we have continued to investigate the problem of illegal robocalls over the last year, it has become clear that some originating providers are not doing enough to vet their customers, allowing bad actors to infiltrate our U.S. phone networks,” he said. Some providers, he added, “do the bare minimum (or worse) and have become complicit in illegal robocalling schemes.”

The framework borrows from banking’s anti-money-laundering rules. The FCC is also asking whether carriers should retain identity documentation for at least four years after a customer leaves and whether they should check customers against law enforcement watchlists. Penalties would shift to a per-call basis, meaning fines of $1,000 to $15,000 for every illegal call a poorly verified customer places.

The real privacy stakes sit in the proposal’s section on prepaid service. Right now, you can pay cash for a prepaid phone and SIM card without showing identification. Journalists use prepaid phones to protect sources, domestic violence survivors use them to avoid being traced, and whistleblowers, activists, or anyone with a reason to separate phone activity from legal identity relies on this.

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New York Mandates Kill Switch and Surveillance Software in Your 3D Printer - Violations are a Felony

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:14:04 GMT

by Matt Agorist

The political class in New York has just mandated a digital panopticon inside your living room, slipping draconian provisions into the Fiscal Year 2027 State Budget. Stripped of the political spin, the state has cemented what Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration enthusiastically brands as "first-in-the-nation" safety requirements, legally ordering manufacturers to install surveillance software on private 3D printers. It is a calculated move to monitor the private activities of peaceful individuals under the guise of public safety.

The state is attempting to sell this massive overreach to the public as a heroic crusade against the phantom menace of “ghost guns.” According to Hochul’s official press releases, untraceable 3D-printed firearms are the fastest-growing threat to public safety and demand immediate legislative intervention. The political establishment believes this manufactured panic grants them the moral authority to require a digital permission slip just to operate a machine sitting on a workbench in your own home.

From a liberty perspective, this is an unprecedented escalation of the surveillance state and a direct assault on both the First and Second Amendments. The budget provisions explicitly demand mandatory censorware, forcing companies to embed print-blocking Digital Rights Management into their hardware. Your printer will now be expected to actively scan your files in real time, shutting down entirely if a state-mandated algorithm decides your plastic geometry looks too dangerous.

The assault doesn’t stop at hardware, as the state is actively criminalizing code itself. Part C of the budget threatens Class E felony charges for the mere possession or sharing of 3D-printable files capable of producing a firearm component, effectively treating digital data as contraband. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation has highlighted, this means a journalist, a researcher, or a hobbyist sharing a CAD file could be kidnapped and caged by armed agents simply for transmitting information.

This blatant criminalization of knowledge operates on the technological farce that geometry scanners actually work. An algorithm has no inherent ability to distinguish between a custom bracket, a piece of plumbing, and a gun component. The state is legally mandating a broken, overreaching system that will inevitably brick legitimate projects and log innocent users’ data in a centralized dragnet.

This entire framework is nothing more than the violent initiation of force against peaceful people. Sharing a digital file or modifying a piece of plastic on a privately owned machine inherently lacks a victim. Yet, the State of New York is eagerly threatening to deploy armed police to enforce these victimless crimes, an authoritarian tactic we expose daily at The Free Thought Project.

This is not some abstract, dystopian warning; the state of New York is already demonstrating its eagerness to destroy peaceful lives over the basic exercise of self-ownership. One only needs to look at the tragic persecution of Dexter Taylor to understand the grim reality of these mandates. Taylor, a peaceful Brooklyn man, was violently raided by heavily armed NYPD and ATF agents, dragged through a biased legal system, and ultimately sentenced to ten years in a cage simply for the victimless act of building his own firearms at home. As we have heavily documented at The Free Thought Project, the same state apparatus that routinely turns violent predators loose onto the streets threw the book at a man who harmed absolutely no one.

By criminalizing the mere possession of digital files and forcing 3D printers to act as in-home informants, Hochul’s administration is setting the stage to create a million more Dexter Taylors overnight. They are weaponizing the legal code to ensure that anyone with a laptop, an internet connection, and a desire for self-reliance can be instantly transformed into a violent felon in the eyes of the state. When the government decrees that the transmission of mathematical geometry is equivalent to criminal contraband, every hobbyist, engineer, and privacy advocate becomes a target for the exact same authoritarian violence that stole a decade of Taylor’s life.

When the state attempts to construct a digital cage around your private life, the only moral response is counter-economics and decentralized technological resistance. You do not owe the government compliance with your own subjugation. The immediate practical solution is to abandon proprietary, closed-source printers that bow to these mandates and instead rely entirely on open-source firmware like Marlin or Klipper.

Open-source machines maintained by the community cannot be forced to push over-the-air surveillance updates to your hardware, keeping your workshop completely off the grid. To combat the criminalization of code, individuals must pivot to decentralized, encrypted networks like Tor or localized mesh networks to share and host CAD files. Code is nothing more than speech and data, and it cannot be contained or censored by a desperate political class if it is never centralized in the first place.

Achieving true independence from these mandates also requires severing the financial ties that allow the state to track your hardware purchases. If you are buying parts or supporting open-source developers, you must abandon the fiat system that happily hands your transaction history over to regulators. Relying on privacy-centric tools and private ecosystems like Zano or Dash is the only way to effectively shield your financial footprint and starve the surveillance apparatus of the data it needs to function.

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The Mystery of Falling Fertility

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:06:28 GMT

Etienne Note: Check out our monograph: Solving Covid - The Covid 19 Eugenics, Vaccine/Drug Scam Timeline https://artofliberty.substack.com/p/solving-covid-the-covid-19-eugenics at and its companion article: The Covid 19 Suspects and Their Ties to Eugenics and Population Control/Reduction https://artofliberty.substack.com/p/the-covid-19-suspects-and-their-ties to understand who is behind “The Covid”

by Tomas Fürst

This analysis originated as a student project in my Data Science course at Palacky University, Czech Republic. Several students contributed, with Michal Malcik doing the most. It might be one of the more consequential pieces of coursework.

Introduction

At the beginning of 2022, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in many European countries started to decrease dramatically. A rapid and unexpected decline in TFR has occurred in all the Baltic states, across Northern Europe, Central Europe, and in all major countries of Western Europe. Only Greece, Spain, Italy, Croatia, and Romania did not exhibit such dramatic declines, while Portugal and Bulgaria even experienced TFR growth (see Figure 1).

This dramatic and unexpected change in TFR dynamics that occurred synchronously across most of Europe begs for an explanation. Several mechanisms have been proposed in the mainstream media.

The aging of population and changes in the size of the fertile cohort. However, the TFR is a statistical measure which is independent of the size of population and its age structure. Thus, while population size and age structure do affect natality (aka birth rate), they do not affect the Total Fertility Rate. The TFR is the average number of children that are born to a woman over her lifetime (assuming the age-specific fertility rates remain constant through their lifetime, and they survive until the end of their reproductive life).
The prize shock brought to Europe by the war in Ukraine. However, inflation in Europe started climbing to exceptional levels as late as summer 2022. This is nearly a year after the factors behind the decline in TFR would have taken place.
The epidemic of infections with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. However, a large part of the European population was infected during 2020, yet the TFR in most countries actually went up in 2021 (see Figure 1). It would be difficult to argue that one strain of SARS-CoV-2 does not affect TFR while another does.
The effect of Covid lockdowns. However, the most stringent (and most surprising) lockdowns happened in 2020, yet the TFR in many countries actually went up in 2021 (see Figure 1).
A broader shift in the values of the population. However, such a shift would have to occur simultaneously across many countries with different history, religion, values, economic cycles, ethnic composition, and population dynamics. Moreover, one would have to show that this dramatic shift occurred exactly between the two most dramatic events of the last generation – the start of the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine. All of that is highly unlikely.

Yet, there is another factor which is almost never discussed in public. In the spring of 2021, millions of women of child-bearing age were subjected to the experimental mRNA vaccine against Covid. Since the beginning of the vaccination campaign, there have been many reports of menstruation disorders after the vaccines. In the largest pharmacovigilance database, the VAERS, the number of stillbirths/miscarriages reported after a vaccine jumped from less than 100 before 2020 to more than 3,000 after a Covid vaccine in 2021 alone. The number of menstrual disorder reports increased from lower hundreds before 2020 to more than 27,000 after a Covid vaccine in 2021 alone. Thus, an adverse effect of the Covid vaccines on fertility is plausible.

Moreover, the rapid and unexpected decline in fertility started about 9 months after the mass vaccination event took place. Thus, it is natural to ask if the vaccines have caused this decline. It is notoriously difficult to answer causal questions from observation data. However, the first step in this quest is to establish association.

Data Description

For American readers, some comments about the Czech healthcare landscape are necessary: Everything is very “homogeneous” here. We have universal, free, and very regulated healthcare, so almost everyone gets the same care (allowing for some corruption here and there). Everyone is entitled to free healthcare the extent of which is prescribed by a government decree. From the communist times, we inherited the system of compulsory “personal citizen numbers” (state-provided IDs), so everyone is very well accounted for.

The Czech state collects a huge amount of healthcare (and other) data that are connected to the state-provided IDs and centrally stored. Although we have “health insurance companies,” they all have to cover the same care for everyone and are financed by the state through a compulsory universal “health-tax” collected as a percentage of income. Consequently, the Czech official healthcare data is so precise, clean, homogeneous, and detailed that nothing comparable will ever be available in the US. So, if answers can be found in this type of data, they will be especially apparent and irrefutable in the Czech data.

Recently, a unique database was published by the Institute of Health Information and Statistics (IHIS). The database contains over 17 million lines. There are six types of events that the data covers: Covid vaccination, Covid infection (i.e. a positive PCR test), childbirth, spontaneous abortion, induced abortion, and death (of the woman). If a woman in the Czech Republic experienced any of the above listed events between 1.1.1994 and 31.12.2023, there is a single line in the CSV file for that event.

Each woman has a unique identifier so that events that occurred in the same woman can be paired. In the original version of the data (that was taken down in the meantime, probably due to concerns about individual identification), the year of birth for each woman was provided and the month and year for each event was provided. In the new version of the data, only the decade of birth is provided, and the year of each event is provided.

The data contains approximately 9.6 million vaccination events, 2.2 million infection events, 3.0 million births, 370,000 spontaneous abortions, 830,000 induced abortions, and 1.6 million deaths. Each death has a unique ICD-10 code providing the cause of death. To our knowledge, it is the only publicly available database that connects reproductive events with Covid vaccination data at the level of individual records.

Methods

To show an association between an intervention and an outcome, the Self-Controlled Case Series (SCCS) design may be used. In this design, individuals act as their own controls. We used the SCCS design to study the association between Covid vaccination (exposure) and childbirth (outcome). One has to be careful in this case because both the exposure (vaccination) and the outcome (childbirth) are influenced by the will of the women and can be planned well in advance. The SCCS design is often used in assessing vaccine safety; however, while the decision to accept the vaccine is usually voluntary, the onset of an adverse event is not. The SCCS design overcomes the problem of unobserved confounders that plague comparisons between vaccinated and unvaccinated cohorts (see our Mirror of Erised study). It also solves the problem that each individual underwent the intervention at a different time.

Results

We selected all women born between 1975 and 2024 who were vaccinated by the first dose of any Covid vaccine and who gave birth to at least one child between 1993 and 2023. We divided this cohort into six birth cohorts and plotted the number of births (per 1,000 women in the respective birth cohort) as a function of the month relative to the month of the vaccine. Figure 2 shows the amazing patterns that emerge.

The following features are interesting.

There is a sharp peak in the number of births (especially in women at the peak of their fertility) about 2 months before the first dose. This means that many women postponed vaccination to after childbirth. The peak is less pronounced in the youngest (gray) and oldest (blue) cohort. It is important to note that the horizontal axis does not represent actual time – each woman has her own time beginning with the month of the first dose. Thus, neither the peak nor the trough can be observed in the Czech population data. It is the magic of the SCCS design that makes this pattern visible.
There is an order of magnitude drop in the number of births at month 0 (i.e., at the month of vaccination) followed by eight months (0–7) of very small numbers. This means that women avoided the vaccine if they knew they were pregnant. Month 0 is the very month of vaccination – few women wanted to get vaccinated at the month of childbirth. Giving birth in month 7 after the first dose means that the first dose was administered 7 months before the childbirth – i.e., around the second month of pregnancy, i.e., around the time the woman learned she was pregnant. Very few women wanted to get vaccinated if they knew they were pregnant. This is interesting, especially because the Czech authorities recommended Covid vaccination during pregnancy. Figure 2, among others, clearly depicts the lack of trust of Czech women towards the authorities.
The number of births rises in months 8–11 back toward baseline. This means that women who either wanted to get pregnant (childbirths 9–11 months after the first dose) or were pregnant already and knew it (childbirths 8–9 months after the first dose) also tried to avoid the vaccine.
Since the cohorts are fixed by birthdate, their age and their fertility changes so it cannot be expected that after the trough, their birth rate would return to pre-vaccination levels. E.g. women born 1985–1989 (yellow line in Figure 2) were past 35 in 2020, and so their fertility was already decreasing. On the other hand, women born 1995–1999 (pink line) were past 25 in 2020 and their fertility was increasing. Thus, it is difficult to draw any conclusions from the behavior of the graph before and after the anomaly caused by the first dose. Comparison with the unvaccinated cohort is difficult due to confounding and due to the absence of the pivot month (i.e. the month of the first dose).

To check the stability of the pattern, we repeated the analysis with the month of the second dose as month zero. Since most women vaccinated with dose 1 went on to receive dose 2 about a month later, we expected to see a similar pattern, only shifted about one month to the left. This is almost exactly what can be observed in Figure 3.

Discussion

The main effect that Figures 2 and 3 show is that in Czech women, vaccination against Covid is very strongly associated with low birthrate. This association is beyond any doubt and no further proof is required, although it would be nice to see this type of analysis repeated in other countries. Also, it is obvious that this association is causal in the sense that the pattern is not the result of a coincidence or confounding.

The main question is the direction of the causal effect. Either the vaccine reduces the probability of becoming pregnant, or pregnancy reduces the willingness to get vaccinated, or both mechanisms are at work simultaneously. The second possibility is almost certainly true. Czech women are much more sensible than Czech vaccinologists and generally tried to avoid the vaccine while pregnant or before conception. As a result, births became “concentrated” in the unvaccinated group, which led to lower fertility among the vaccinated, especially shortly after the vaccine.

However, if this was the only causal mechanism at work in 2021, the total fertility rate of the whole population (regardless of vaccination status) would not have changed. Czech women would simply have split into those who want a child and do not want the vaccine, and those who do not want a child and do want the vaccine. Such a division would have had no effect on the overall fertility of the population. It would be like placing shorter women on the left side of a basketball court and taller women on the right—the average height of women on the field would remain unchanged.

However, total fertility began to decline quite dramatically in January 2022, and its decline has not stopped since (see again Figure 1). It is therefore certain that sometime in the spring of 2021, another causal mechanism must have started to operate—one different from the voluntary change in behavior described above. In our opinion, the Covid vaccine is still the most plausible candidate (see the Introduction again). We thus hypothesize that the mRNA-based experimental vaccines prevented some women from getting pregnant.

One might argue that even this mechanism may be voluntary: Vaccinated women may only have postponed pregnancy due to recent vaccination. This would have resulted in a decrease in TFR about a year after the vaccine rollout (which is indeed observed) followed by an overshoot in TFR when the “postponed” babies would be born. However, no such rebound ever occurred. On the contrary, the TFR of Czech women never even returned to pre-pandemic levels – it has been decreasing by about 10% per year for the past 4 years.

So, some vaccinated women either decided they do not want children, or the vaccine prevented them from getting pregnant by some biological pathway. These two possibilities cannot be distinguished in observational data. The reader can decide which of the two is more plausible.

Conclusion

We have analyzed a unique individual-level database of reproduction events by Covid vaccination status which was briefly published (and subsequently taken down) by the Czech government. We found an extremely strong association between Covid vaccination and low fertility.

Most of the pattern can be explained by a change in the behavior of women – despite official recommendation, pregnant women tried to avoid the experimental vaccines. However, this effect could not have been the only causal mechanism at work as it would have left the total fertility rate of the entire population (regardless of vaccination status) unchanged. Since the TFR of Czech women started decreasing sharply in January 2022, some causal mechanism must have been at work in the spring of 2021. We hypothesize that the mRNA-based experimental vaccines prevented some women from getting pregnant.

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"They'll Be Laughing No Longer": Trump Rejects Iran Peace Deal Response As "Totally Unacceptable"

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:54:02 GMT

by Tyler Durden

Summary

Trump calls Iran’s peace proposal response “totally unacceptable”
Iran warns of ‘decisive, immediate’ response to British or French warships approaching Hormuz Strait.
Iran responds Sunday to US peace proposal, finally submitting something official to Pakistan. Details not initially disclosed. Trump TS: Iran “playing games with the United States.”
IRGC new warning: will unleash “heavy attack” on US bases in region if more Hormuz aggression persists.

Trump Says Iran Response “Totally Unacceptable”

President Trump has just issued a statement on his TruthSocial feed rejecting ‘unacceptable’ Iranian proposal for ending war.

“I have just read the response from Iran’s so-called “Representatives.”
I don’t like it — TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!
Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Iran offered to transfer some of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to a third country, but rejected the idea of dismantling its nuclear facilities, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Iran disputed the report, according to Iran’s semi-official news agency Tasnim.

And with the fragile ceasefire still holding for now, the odds of a peace deal by the end of May have plummeted.

Iran: We’ll Immediately Strike French & British if they Approach Strait

Iran has newly warned of “a decisive and immediate response” to any deployment of European military vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and has further declared that the Islamic Republic alone controls security in the strategic waterway. Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi issued the warning Sunday in a post on X after France and Britain announced plans to deploy warships to the region.

“Whether in times of war or peace, only the Islamic Republic of Iran can establish security in this strait and will not allow any country to interfere in such matters,” he said.

Gharibabadi said France plans to deploy its flagship aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, to the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, while Britain plans to send a warship to the area under the stated goal of protecting freedom of navigation. Already these Western allied assets are moving through the Suez Canal as of days ago.

“Any deployment and stationing of extra-regional destroyers around the Strait of Hormuz, under the pretext of protecting shipping, is nothing but an escalation of the crisis, the militarization of a vital waterway, and an attempt to cover up the true root of insecurity in the region,” he stated.

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But France and Britain have previously sought to clarify that their warships will remain largely in a background support role when compared to the US naval blockade in the Gulf of Oman region. Their ships would only directly join Persian Gulf operations only once the war ended, according to reports.

Trump: Iran is Playing Games With the United States

New Sunday Truth Social statement soon on the heels of Tehran submitting its response to the US peace proposal, via Pakistan:

Trump said Iran had been “playing games with the United States, and the rest of the world, for 47 years,” adding that it had been “laughing at our new GREAT AGAIN country,” but stressed that “they will be laughing no longer!”

Iran Finally Responds To US

After days of waiting, Iran has submitted its response to the latest US peace proposal to mediator Pakistan, despite the recent flare-up in renewed exchanges of fire in the contested Strait of Hormuz this past week.

“Iran has submitted its response to the latest US proposal to end 10 weeks of war, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency reported on Sunday, without providing any further details,” Bloomberg confirms in a fresh headline. “Tehran hasn’t yet given any public indication it would accept President Donald Trump’s plan that stipulates Iran permits passage through the Strait of Hormuz and Washington ends its blockade on Iranian ports in the next month.”

IRAN REPLY TO US PROPOSAL INCLUDES ENDING WAR ON ALL FRONTS: TV

This comes as Qatar’s PM has warned Iran that using the Strait of Hormuz as a pressure card, to choke the global economy, “would only lead to deepening the crisis” - and amid reports there could still be sporadic attacks on Gulf countries like the UAE. According to more of the limited details:

Sources in both camps have told Reuters the latest peace efforts are aimed at a temporary memorandum of understanding to halt the war and allow traffic through the Strait of Hormuz while they discuss a fuller deal, which would have to address intractable disputes such as Iran’s nuclear program.

The latest from Iran’s president:

President Trump told Fox News days ago, “They want to make a deal. We’ve had very good talks over the last 24 hours, and it’s very possible that we’ll make a deal.” He had said if this happens “it’ll be over quickly” and oil prices will plummet.

IRGC Fresh Warning on US Bases

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has warned any attack on Iranian oil tankers and commercial ships will be met with assaults on US bases and “enemy ships” in the region, Al Jazeera reports.

“Warning! Any aggression against the oil tankers and commercial vessels of the Islamic Republic of Iran will be met with a heavy attack on one of the American centers in the region and the enemy’s ships,” the IRGC Navy said in the statement.

Tehran is accusing the US side of severely violating the ceasefire earlier this week, by firing on and disabling two Iranian-flagged tankers trying to reach Iranian ports. State media reviewed of these hostile incidents:

In a statement, the spokesman for Iran’s Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters said the “aggressive, terrorist and marauding US military” had targeted an Iranian oil tanker sailing from Iran’s coastal waters near Jask toward the Strait of Hormuz, as well as another vessel entering the strategic waterway near the UAE port of Fujairah.
The spokesman also said civilian areas along the coasts of Bandar Khamir, Sirik and Qeshm Island came under aerial attacks carried out “with the cooperation of some regional countries.”

The IRGC further said it will respond “powerfully and without the slightest hesitation” to any aggression or attack. Indeed there are reports that during the past week’s skirmishes Iran fired on three US warships seeking to exit waters of Iran’s coast.

Ayatollah Meets With Military Commander

We reported earlier that in an official update Iran said that Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei had been ‘moderately injured’ but is recovering, and he had met with the president of the Islamic Republic. On Sunday he also met with a top military commader, per state Mehr, which writes: “In a meeting with Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei, Commander of Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters Major General Ali Abdollahi presented a comprehensive report on the preparedness of the powerful Armed Forces of the country to confront enemies’ strategic mistake.”

via Mehr

According to more of the state readout:

Abdollahi said “all fighters of Islam” possess high readiness in terms of morale, defensive and offensive preparedness, strategic plans, and the equipment and weaponry required to confront hostile actions by the “American-Zionist enemies.”
He warned that if the enemies commit any “strategic mistake, aggression, or invasion,” Iranian forces would respond “swiftly, intensely, and powerfully.”
The commander also assured the Leader that the armed forces would, “with full obedience” to his orders, defend “the ideals of the Islamic Revolution, our beloved land Iran, sovereignty, national interests, and the brave Iranian nation until the last breath and to the death.”
During the meeting, Ayatollah Khamenei praised the country’s armed forces and issued new directives for continuing action and confronting enemies decisively following the 40-day US-Israeli war against the country.

The Wall Street Journal wrote Saturday of the Ayatollah, “A government official claimed Khamenei, who hasn’t been seen in public since that attack, is now in good health.” However, there’s still a lot of speculation on his role in national decision-making, and over whether he will ever make a public appearance.

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US Firm Unveils Ground Bot With Enough Power To Fire Laser Guns

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:46:44 GMT

by Tyler Durden

Utah-based defense tech firm Hypercraft has unveiled a 300 hp diesel-hybrid-electric unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) that can power directed-energy weapons, charge drones, and sustain a forward command post, all autonomously.

Defense Blog’s Dylan Malyasov reports that Hypercraft’s Razorback UGV can travel 280 miles on a single charge, reach speeds of 60 mph, and export 38 kilowatts of power, which is enough to power laser weapons and recharge drones.

Razorback is being positioned as a critical energy source for forward operating units that need power for drones, electronic warfare, ISR, counter-UAS systems, and communications. The UGV is also designed to move supplies and support infrastructure on the modern battlefield.

The role of UGVs on the battlefield is still being shaped in real time by the Russia-Ukraine war, where robots, whether ground bots or drones, are increasingly removing infantrymen from harm’s way as the grinding fight evolves into a war of attrition fought by machines.

The wars across Eurasia, from Ukraine-Russia to the U.S.-Iran conflict, have validated a new style of warfare in which cheap ground robots and drones increasingly operate in ‘no man’s land’ (front lines). The next phase is already coming: humanoid systems entering the battlespace as militaries look to push more machines, not infantrymen, into the kill zone.

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What percent of autism cases are attributable to vaccines?

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:43:02 GMT

by Toby Rogers

Editor’s note: Steve Kirsch and I independently arrived at the same estimate for the Population Attributable Fraction (PAF) of autism cases caused by vaccines. I previously missed his groundbreaking work on this topic (see 1, 2, and 3). That being said, this is an extremely important facet of the autism causation conversation so I want to shine a light on it and build the case piece by piece so that readers will understand the revolutionary implications of this finding.

Population Attributable Fraction: A Primer

I. What is it?

The Population Attributable Fraction (PAF) answers a specific and important question: if we could eliminate a particular exposure from the entire population, what fraction of all cases of a particular disease would disappear?

It bridges the gap between two different ways of thinking about causation:

Individual risk: In this case, “How much more likely is a vaccinated child to develop autism than an unvaccinated child?” (In prospective studies this is usually expressed as the risk ratio, RR, and in retrospective studies this is usually expressed as the odds ratio, OR.)
Population burden: “How much of the total autism in the population is attributable to vaccination?” (This is the PAF.)

The formula is:

PAF = Pe(RR − 1) / [Pe(RR − 1) + 1]

Where:

Pe = prevalence of exposure in the population (what fraction of the population is exposed)
RR = relative risk, also known as the risk ratio, (or one can use the odds ratio as an approximation if the incidence in the population is low)

II. The history of PAF

1953: Smoking and lung cancer

The intellectual foundation was laid by Morton Levin, an epidemiologist at Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo, in a 1953 paper in Acta Unio Internationalis Contra Cancrum. Levin was trying to answer a practical public health question: we know smokers get lung cancer at much higher rates, but how much of the total lung cancer burden in the population could we eliminate by ending smoking? He called his measure the “attributable risk percent” and derived the initial formula.

1960s: Refinement and naming

Brian MacMahon and colleagues at Harvard helped formalize the framework during the 1960s. The terminology was inconsistent for decades — in the literature one sees “attributable risk,” “attributable fraction,” “etiologic fraction,” and “population attributable risk percent” — all referring to essentially the same concept. This terminological chaos may have slowed its adoption but this was clearly a valuable concept for epidemiology and public health.

1974: Miettinen’s contribution

Olli Miettinen, a Finnish-American epidemiologist, published a highly influential paper refining the formula and clarifying the distinction between the “attributable fraction in the exposed” (how much of the risk in exposed individuals is due to the exposure) versus the “population attributable fraction” (how much of the disease in the whole population is due to the exposure). Attributable fraction in the exposed is used in toxic tort litigation today (see Schachtman, 2015).

1980s onward: Public health adoption

PAF became standard in chronic disease epidemiology — tobacco, obesity, alcohol, occupational exposures, air pollution, etc. The CDC and WHO began routinely publishing PAF estimates for major risk factors. The massive Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which began in 1990 and is now updated annually, uses PAF as its central tool for ranking risk factors by their contribution to the disease burden worldwide. When you see headlines that say “alcohol causes X% of all cancer deaths” — that’s PAF.

III. Who uses PAF today?

Epidemiologists use it to prioritize which risk factors to target for public health intervention. If Risk Factor A has a high OR but low exposure prevalence, and Risk Factor B has a lower OR but near-universal exposure, PAF reveals that B may be the more important target.

Health economists use it to estimate the cost savings from eliminating a risk factor — e.g., how many hospitalizations and how much spending disappears if smoking rates drop by 20%.

Regulatory agencies use it to justify interventions — the EPA, for instance, uses PAF-type calculations when setting air quality standards to estimate how many deaths would be prevented.

IV. We can calculate the PAF for vaccines and autism

Three key studies help us create a range of plausible estimates of the PAF for vaccines and autism.

Mawson et al. (2017) in a study of homeschool children in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oregon found that vaccinated children had 4.2 times higher odds of an autism diagnosis compared to unvaccinated children (OR = 4.2; CI: 1.2, 14.5).

Mawson & Jacob (2025) using Florida Medicaid data found that children with 11 or more visits to the doctor that included vaccinations were 4.4 times more likely to have been diagnosed with autism than those with no visit for vaccination (95% CI: 2.85, 6.84).

Hooker & Miller (2021) in a study of three medical practices in the U.S. found that vaccination increases the odds of developing autism 5.03-fold (95% CI 1.64, 15.5).

So we can now plug these into our formula:

PAF = Pe(RR − 1) / [Pe(RR − 1) + 1]

Where:

Pe = prevalence of exposure in the population (what fraction of the population is exposed)
RR = relative risk (I’m using odds ratio as an approximation which is justifiable in this case because autism prevalence is still considered somewhat “rare” — in the single digits)

We’ll use a Pe of 0.97 to reflect the fact that 97% of children are vaccinated.

And then we’ll calculate the PAF for each of the three key studies:

Mawson et al. 2017 — OR = 4.2, Pe = 0.97

PAF = 0.97(3.2) / (0.97 × 3.2 + 1) = 3.104 / (3.104 + 1) = 3.104 / 4.104 = 75.6%

Mawson & Jacob 2025 — OR = 4.4, Pe = 0.97

PAF = 0.97(3.4) / (0.97 × 3.4 + 1) = 3.298 / (3.298 + 1) = 3.298 / 4.298 = 76.7%

Hooker & Miller 2021 — OR = 5.03, Pe = 0.97

PAF = 0.97(4.03) / (0.97 × 4.03 + 1) = 3.909 / (3.909 + 1) = 3.909 / 4.909 = 79.6%

So that gives us our range — 75.6% to 79.6%. What this means is that, if the OR is real and causal, approximately 75.6% to 79.6% of current autism cases would not exist if no children were vaccinated. That is an extraordinarily large number.

V. Qualifications and limitations

1. A modest OR combined with near-universal exposure produces a huge PAF. As I showed in my last article, even a 4-5x individual OR becomes a massive epidemic in society when 97% of children are exposed, which is what is happening with vaccines and autism. One could choose a lower Pe (say, the percentage of children who are “fully up to date” on vaccines according to the CDC schedule) and that would bring down the PAF estimates somewhat.

2. A key limitation — PAF assumes the OR (or RR) is causal, not merely associational. If the association between vaccination and autism is confounded — for instance, if children who aren’t vaccinated are systematically different from children who are vaccinated in ways that independently affect autism risk — then the PAF calculation would overstate the true causal burden.

We can have that conversation, however, I don’t think it will change the results. The best available vaccinated vs. unvaccinated studies (Mawson et al. 2017, Hooker & Miller 2021, and Mawson & Jacob 2025) control for confounders and examine a wide range of study populations yet reach similar conclusions.

Furthermore, numerous independent scholars (e.g., Christopher Exley, Lucija Tomljenovic, Christopher Shaw, Romain Gherardi, Yehuda Shoenfeld, and Peter McCullough) have worked out plausible pathways by which vaccines can cause autism and several studies have been published that satisfy the Bradford Hill criteria for causation (see Tomljenovic & Shaw, 2011; Bjelogrlić, 2025; and Hooker et al. 2026).

3. The confidence intervals in Mawson et al. 2017 and Hooker & Miller 2021 are large. If one calculated a PAF using the lower bound of their 95% confidence intervals one would have a much lower PAF (roughly 16%). But the sample size and number of autism cases in Mawson & Jacob 2025 are large (resulting in a narrower confidence interval) and the results are consistent across the three studies which lends credibility to these estimates.

4. There is a way to convert OR to RR using a formula from Zhang and Yu (1998). It’s laborious and introduces other uncertainties in the process (namely whether the unexposed group is truly unexposed in previous studies). I ran the numbers anyway and this only reduces my upper-bound PAF estimate by two points, not enough to significantly change my conclusions.

VI. Putting this in context

Smoking and lung cancer. In the Norwegian Women and Cancer Study the PAF of lung cancer deaths attributed to smoking was 85.5% (Hansen et al. 2020). A 2011 meta-analysis found a PAF of lung cancer cases caused by smoking of 93.1% in men and 82.6% in women (Pesch et al. 2011). As smoking has declined in the U.S., the fraction of lung cancer deaths attributable to smoking decreased from 81.4% to 74.7% (Shiels et al. 2023).

Asbestos and mesothelioma. Drawing on the Global Burden of Disease 2019 dataset across 204 countries, Chen et al. (2024) found that 91.7% of mesothelioma deaths were attributable to occupational asbestos exposure. Only about 4% of lung cancer cases in U.S. men are attributable to asbestos exposure (McCormack et al. 2012).

Radon and lung cancer. Radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gas that seeps up from soil and rock into buildings. It is the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking and the leading cause among non-smokers. Gaskin et al. (2018) estimated that residential radon causes approximately 16.5% of global lung cancer deaths (that was the median PAF across the 66 countries surveyed).

So the PAF for vaccines and autism cases is about the same as the PAF for smoking and lung cancer deaths, somewhat less than the PAF for asbestos and mesothelioma deaths, and significantly higher than the PAF for radon and lung cancer deaths.

Seen in this light, vaccines are one of the most harmful exposures in the world and pose a massive health burden on the population — particularly since the exposures are so widespread.

VII. Conclusion

Steve Kirsch was the first person to calculate a PAF for vaccines and autism but I was not aware of his work on this topic until after I calculated it myself. We both reached the same conclusions — Mr. Kirsch found a PAF of 75% to 80% and I found a PAF of 75.6% to 79.6%. This is an astonishingly high number and it shows that vaccines are one of the largest preventable harms to the health of the public.

If history is any guide, supporters of the status quo will launch waves of ad hominem attacks in response to these findings. But these results are difficult to dismiss. The best vaccinated vs. unvaccinated studies show that vaccines increase autism risk by a factor of 4.2 to 5.03. All I’ve done here is to plug the best available data into a widely used epidemiological equation to calculate the percentage of autism cases in the population caused by vaccines. You likely haven’t seen these calculations before because widespread regulatory and epistemic capture prevents mainstream scholars from asking questions they know might end their careers.

While the pharmaceutical industry tries to figure out how to protect its profits from the devastating and possibly criminal implications of these findings, for everyone else, this is extremely good news — we now know how to prevent up to 79.6% of autism cases — stop vaccinating.

Given these straightforward findings and the high quality of the underlying data I am calling on President Trump, Secretary Kennedy, NIH Director Bhattacharya, and FDA Commissioner Makary to immediately halt and permanently end the CDC Child and Adolescent Vaccine Schedule and the CDC Pregnancy Vaccine Recommendations.

I am also calling on all states to immediately halt and permanently end vaccine mandates for school or any form of employment.

And I am calling on all parents who currently use mainstream allopathic pediatricians to fire that provider and instead find a functional, integrative, or naturopathic medical doctor who doesn’t vaccinate in their practice.

Autism is just ONE harm caused by vaccines. The next task is to calculate the PAF for vaccines and a wide range of additional harms including ADHD, allergies, arthritis, asthma, autoimmune disorders, Alzheimer’s, childhood cancers, diabetes, ear infections, eczema, epilepsy/seizure disorders, Gulf War Syndrome, and hundreds of other chronic conditions.

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Surveillance Tools Intended for Border Control Are Being Used Against Americans

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Sun, 10 May 2026 12:11:04 GMT

(Illustration: Midjourney)

It goes without saying that any tool or power government acquires for addressing some crisis of the moment will eventually—often, almost immediately—be deployed against the general public. So it is with border enforcement and the crackdown on immigrants. Surveillance technology ostensibly intended for the enforcement of laws regulating migration is being turned against Americans.

‘Easy Access to the Home and Workplace Addresses of American Citizens’

“In the battle against illegal immigration, the U.S. is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on tools that give federal agents easy access to the home and workplace addresses of American citizens, their social-media accounts, vehicle information, flight history, law-enforcement records and other personal information, as well as data to track their daily comings and goings,” The Wall Street Journal‘s Shane Shifflett and Hannah Critchfield reported last week.

The article opened with the story of Liz McLellan, a Maine resident who photographed federal agents participating in an immigration crackdown. Agents went to her home and told her, “This is a warning. We know you live right here.” Understandably, she took that as a threat.

In fact, McLellan was well within her rights to record federal agents. As Freedom Forum notes, “Courts have protected a general right to record law enforcement when the officers are performing official actions in a public space, such as a street or park. This right is protected under both freedom of speech as free expression and freedom of the press, which includes protection for gathering information about the government and for sharing it with others.”

Federal officials complain that activists publish information about agents that may impede operations, but that’s also a protected activity. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) points out, “government officials and employees don’t enjoy special immunity from ‘doxxing.’ To the contrary, the power they exercise makes it even more important that people be free to criticize them and disclose information that holds them accountable.”

So, the feds were just trying to intimidate McLellan to get her to stop her constitutionally protected monitoring of government operations. They used capabilities acquired to combat illegal immigration to identify her and go to her home. As the Journal‘s Shifflett and Critchfield add, the “high-tech dragnet built to locate, track and deport people residing illegally in the U.S., allows thousands of federal agents nationwide to peruse a trove of data belonging to more than 300 million people, including citizens.”

‘ICE Had Access to the Driver’s License Data of 3 in 4 Adults’

In a report updated last year, American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century, the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology delved into the surveillance capabilities assembled in the name of border control. As of 2022, the authors found, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “had scanned the driver’s license photos of 1 in 3 adults,” “had access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 adults,” “was tracking the movements of drivers in cities home to 3 in 4 adults,” and “could locate 3 in 4 adults through their utility records.” Further, it explained, ICE “built its surveillance dragnet by tapping data from private companies and state and local bureaucracies” and “spent approximately $2.8 billion between 2008 and 2021 on new surveillance, data collection and data-sharing programs.”

The report referenced a contract with Palantir which would “provide the government with the ability to track people’s movements with ‘near real-time visibility.’” According to The Wall Street Journal, that contract has since expanded to provide federal agents with the Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) phone app, which pulls from a variety of government databases to plot targeted individuals on a map.

Scanning driver’s license photos is especially consequential with the deployment of the Mobile Fortify facial recognition app. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), “When ICE agents or officers encounter an individual or associates of that individual, they will use the Mobile Fortify app installed on their government-issued device to take a photograph. The photograph is then sent by the application to CBP’s [Customs and Border Protection] Traveler Verification Service, in ATS [redacted] as well as the Seizure and Apprehension Workflow that contains the biometric gallery of individuals for whom CBP maintains derogatory information.” The app also performs contactless fingerprint checks. “CBP saves the new photographs and fingerprints, taken using Mobile Fortify…for 15 years,” adds DHS.

Vast Amounts of Data Available From a Photograph of a Face

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) warns that “ICE is currently using the Mobile Fortify app in the field to identify anyone they happen to encounter and want to identify.” In a letter joined by other civil liberties groups, EPIC cautions that Mobile Fortify pulls up vast amounts of data from photos. “By pointing their phone at an individual for face identification, ICE can query various databases and obtain data related to ‘individuals, vehicles, airplanes, vessels, addresses, phone numbers and firearms.’”

In a case of predictable mission creep, federal agents are using Mobile Fortify not just on suspected undocumented migrants, but also against protesters like McLellan. Scanned protesters have lost TSA PreCheck and Global Entry status for travel. In itself that may not sound like a big deal, but it means the federal government is willing to identify and retaliate against people for exercising constitutionally protected rights. That can extend to more serious consequences.

Once somebody is on the government’s radar, agents can target their associates. Vanderbilt Law School’s Bianca Castillo reports that federal officers use a system called Penlink which “allows agents to ‘geofence’ a specific area and identify all cell phones within its range, thus giving ICE the ability to track the movements and locations of these phones and their owners over time.” The feds use the system without seeking warrants, claiming it is a commercial database exempt from Fourth Amendment requirements. But this appears to be “in direct violation of Carpenter v. United States, in which the US Supreme Court held that mobile phone location data revealed so much about people’s lives that, under the Fourth Amendment, authorities need a warrant to access it from phone companies,” adds Castillo.

A Surveillance State for Purposes You Like Is Still a Surveillance State

Even committed border warriors who favor stronger enforcement of immigration rules should have qualms about the deployment of surveillance state capabilities by the government. Tools and techniques adopted for one purpose are inevitably redirected to others, as the government is doing by targeting protesters with technology originally intended for immigration control. These surveillance tools will be used by other agencies to enforce rules and laws important to future administrations.

Ultimately, there’s no such thing as a single-purpose surveillance state. There’s just the misuse and abuse of the government’s ability to monitor and identify people who come to its attention.

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Getting Jacked is Simple

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Sat, 09 May 2026 11:37:47 GMT

by Chaotic Neutral

It’s actually really simple to get jacked. That’s not to say it’s easy- just that the complexity of the challenge is trivial, requiring only time and energy to succeed.

Now, you’re probably raising your eyebrows at this claim. Everywhere you look, there are personal trainers, fitness influencers, nutritionists, and even exercise scientists with conflicting information. Go to any gym, and you’ll see different people doing wildly different exercise routines. Surely, that implies building muscle is a complicated subject? Well, no. For 2 reasons:

The fitness industry thrives on misinformation, because all the money is made in selling supplements, accessories, and ‘personal training expertise’ that have no scientific legitimacy¹
Most people are cognitive misers who actively avoid mentally demanding tasks and refuse to read anything academic²

The result is a very large proportion of fitness enthusiasts have essentially no idea what they’re doing, and even the somewhat knowledgeable ones are still full of misinformation. So, how do we cut through the noise?

Getting Jacked

Think of getting jacked as something like this formula:

X is your adherence to primary concepts, y is your adherence to secondary concepts, and z is your adherence to tertiary concepts. Primary and secondary concepts are a collection of just a handful of relatively simple ideas that require little financial investment. If you just focused on these, you would find getting jacked to be relatively straightforward. But tertiary concepts, predominantly supplements, are innumerable, complex, and require tons of money.

The entire fitness industry is built around obfuscation such that the tertiary concepts can be promoted and sold. And it works wonderfully for making money- but terribly for our motivation to actually get into the gym and train properly.

The paradox of choice is a concept introduced by psychologist Barry Schwartz which suggests that the more options we have, the less satisfied we feel with our decision. This phenomenon occurs because having too many choices requires more cognitive effort, leading to decision fatigue and increased regret over our choices.³

The sheer amount of conflicting information out there certainly makes it difficult to know who to listen to, but it also actively discourages people from getting into fitness at all. And even if you were able to expertly navigate this whole industry of tertiary concepts to find the absolute optimal program, that would still represent just 10% of your results! Nearly everyone should be ignoring Z entirely and instead focusing their efforts on the simple stuff in X and Y.

But what is this simple stuff, you might be wondering? Fortunately, unlike in decades past, we no longer have to rely on the ‘bro-science’ of anecdotes and dubiously extrapolated study conclusions. On the contrary, in the age of information we now have robust research data on what actually matters for getting jacked.

Primary Concepts (60% of Results)

1. Progressive Overload

The most important concept is progressive overloading, which is simply increasing your weight resistance over time as your body adapts.⁴ Muscle growth is a continuous cycle: the body adapts to a given stress, and to continue improving, that stress (e.g., weight, reps, sets) must be gradually increased, forcing the body to adapt again. No matter what exercises you’re doing, or for how long, or with what intensity, the most important thing is that you need to constantly be increasing the challenge. Going to the gym every week for 3 years curling the same 20lb dumbbell isn’t going to do anything. But if you’re curling 30lb at the end of year 1, 40lb at the end of year 2, and 50lb at the end of year 3, guess what- you’re getting jacked.

2. Train to Failure (1 RIR)

You also need to be really pushing yourself hard in the gym, because it’s specifically the last few reps right before your muscles fail that seem to drive results. Modern studies have consistently shown that training to 1 rep-in-reserve (RIR)- continuing a set until you have only enough strength left to complete 1 more final rep- maximizes strength gains and muscular hypertrophy while limiting risk of injury.⁵ Basically, keep lifting until you have doubts about whether or not you can complete another rep. If you can squat 100lb for 10 reps, for 3 sets in a row, then that first set was almost certainly not being trained to 1 RIR. What those 3 sets should look like is something like 10 reps, 8 reps, 6 reps- despite you giving it maximum effort on every set. This indicates that you were indeed pushing yourself close to failure and fatiguing yourself in the process.

3. Consume Sufficient Protein

It’s a trope that gym bros are obsessed with protein, but this is for good reason. Muscle growth cannot occur without sufficient protein.⁶ And relatively high amounts of protein are required in order to optimize muscle growth. Studies suggest increasing protein has a significant impact on muscle growth up to about 1.6-2.2g/kg (0.7-1g/lb) of body weight with substantially diminishing returns after that.⁷ The International Society of Sports Nutrition currently suggests consuming a slightly lower range of 1.4-2.0 g/kg. In other words, if you’re hitting anywhere close to 1g/lb of body weight of daily protein, you’re getting the full benefits. It doesn’t matter much where the protein comes from, though great sources include grilled chicken, Greek yogurt, and protein powder. It also doesn’t matter much how you split this protein up throughout the day, though there is some evidence that protein intake of no more than 40g per meal is optimal.⁸ But, in general, just focus on hitting the absolute numbers and the rest will follow.

4. Abs are made in the gym, and revealed in the kitchen

The final basic concept is that nobody can admire your muscle if you’re fat.⁹ Building muscle mass is step 1, but step 2 is cutting down to a low enough body fat to reveal that muscle. Overall appearance even at the same leanness can vary depending on individual skeletal structure, body fat distribution, and muscle mass- but nonetheless this is what fairly muscular men and women look like at various body fat percentages.

The American Council on Exercise (ACE) has the following classifications for body fat %.¹⁰

Today’s beauty standards for ‘jacked’ tends to fall somewhere around 12% for men and 20% for women- just making it into the ‘athletes’ category. Most amateur fitness enthusiasts dramatically overestimate how lean they actually are. At 12% body fat for men, you should be seeing:¹¹

Defined abs visible when flexed, with a noticeable “V-cut” above the hips
Clear separation between muscle groups, such as rear delts to side delts
Increased vascularity with prominent and visible veins on the arms and shoulders
Sharper facial features, particularly noticeable around the jawline

And at 20% body fat for women:¹²

Muscle definition pops when flexed, particularly in shoulders and quads
Flat stomach (but without sharply segmented abs)
Little excess fat, mostly in hips, thighs, and buttocks- with a smaller waist
Sharper facial features, noticeable around the jawline and cheekbones

Secondary Concepts (30% of Results)

If you’re following the above concepts perfectly, it literally does not matter what else you will do- you will get jacked. But if you really want to optimize your routine, here are a few other concepts to consider.

1. Focus on Compound Lifts

Compound lifts are big, multi-joint exercises that recruit more muscle groups to perform. The more muscle fibers recruited, the stronger the neural signal- and the bigger the adaptive response.¹³ With just 5 exercises (squats, deadlifts, bench press, overhead press, and pull-ups), you will work every major muscle group. It’s easy to improve your form on just these rather than 20 different exercises, easier to track your progress, easier to optimize your time spent in the gym, and they also tend to be more functional for real world strength. Most people should absolutely be relying on compound lifts for their bread-and-butter exercises.

2. Optimize Weekly Set Counts

Multiple studies have confirmed that somewhere around 10-15 sets per muscle group per week is ideal, usually split over several days. The definition of a set varies, but in the research a set is generally counted for a muscle only if that muscle is the main driver of the movement.¹⁴ For example, if you do 5 sets of bench press and 5 sets of overhead press on Mondays and Thursdays, you’re already hitting 10 sets per week of chest and shoulders- adding a 3rd day would probably only be worthwhile if easy to fit into your gym schedule. But if you’re only doing 3 sets each workout, then your rate of muscle growth will definitely be slower than it could be.

3. Follow Lifting Programs

A lifting program tells you what to lift, when to lift it, and how much to suffer while doing so. More formally, it’s a systematic schedule of sets, reps, rest intervals, and progression rules designed to move you towards a goal- usually strength gains, muscle growth, or both. Various gymgoers will swear by various lifting plans that they have tried over the years. One of the most popular, especially for beginners, is called the StrongLifts 5x5. It simply recommends 3 full-body workouts per week on MWF, alternating between workout A and B, with 5 sets of 5 reps for all exercises. Workout A is Squat, Bench, Row. Workout B is Squat, Overhead Press, Deadlift. Try to add 5lb to your lifts every single workout. Rinse and repeat for ~6 months, expecting massive progress as you reap the full rewards of newbie gains.¹⁵

It’s important to note that any lifting program can work, as long as it follows all the primary concepts. More important than program selection is sticking with it over time.

Tertiary Concepts (10% of Results)

1. Rep Ranges

Rep ranges used to be all the rage in the 2000s, during the height of bro science culture. It was fashionable to adjust your weight to target a certain number of reps, such as “15+ reps for endurance, 6-12 reps for size, 1-5 reps for strength.” Turns out, it literally doesn’t matter.¹⁶ Countless studies have demonstrated that what actually matters is going to failure- and whether that happens on the 5th rep or the 25th rep has little relationship to strength and size gains.¹⁷

With that said, why not pick a practical range? If you hit 1-rep-maxes every workout, you’re placing your CNS under severe stress, putting immense strain on your joints, and increasing the chance of injury. If you pick such a light weight that you can do 20 reps straight before feeling fatigued, that’s just not time efficient. Somewhere in the middle, perhaps a weight such that you can perform 10 clean reps on your first set (with less on subsequent sets), is probably the best approach.

2. Mixing It Up

When your body adapts to the same stimulus, it becomes more efficient, leading to stagnation. By introducing different exercises targeting different planes of motion, or switching up the rep scheme, you force new adaptations and can break through plateaus. For example, if plateauing in the usual 10-rep range, it seems to help many individuals to spend a few months training at 5 reps or 20 reps.¹⁸ It’s worth noting, though, that by the time this becomes a serious consideration, you tend to already be pretty jacked.

3. Add Isolation Work

Unlike compound lifts, isolation exercises target specific muscles by involving only one joint at a time. Some specific muscles that tend to be underworked by compound lifts and ideal for isolation include biceps, triceps, lateral delts, calves, and abdominals.¹⁹ They can be worked by bicep curls, triceps extensions, cable flies, calve extensions, and hanging leg raises. But, again, keep in mind that this is likely completely superfluous unless you’re already at least an intermediate lifter well past newbie gains.

4. Supplements

The big one. The $$$ dollar signs. Where fortunes are made and careers are built.

The truth has remained, for decades, that the only supplements worth taking are protein and creatine.²⁰ Everything else has either no evidence whatsoever, dubious study designs, massive conflicts of interest, or commonly a collection of these problems.²¹ For a deep dive on how exactly to investigate supplements, see below. Otherwise, take my word for it- basically everything is a scam.

How Do We Know if it Works?

We’ve already covered the importance of protein. Protein supplements including powder, bars, shakes, are all worthwhile- though there isn’t much difference between brands and products. Meanwhile, creatine is the most studied supplement in the world- with demonstrated benefits in strength training as well as to lesser extent cognitive functions like memory. There have been virtually no health risks observed. All available evidence suggests that that a modest daily supplement is worthwhile.

5. Personal Trainers/Workout Classes

Here’s the thing: personal trainers can absolutely be helpful. But it’s not that they have the secret sauce to getting jacked. Their usefulness comes from motivating you, keeping you accountable, and helping form healthy habits. IF you are confident that you can do all this on your own, then by all means go for it. But if you’ve been struggling for years to start committing to your fitness hobby, it might be very useful to consider finding a personal trainer. Similarly, boxing classes, soul cycle, hot yoga, the value comes from being fun! Any exercise where you consistently show up is better than an ‘optimal’ exercise that you never do. But you still need to find ways of progressive overloading and training close to failure, which can be difficult in many classes.

Common Misconceptions

“I don’t want to be muscular- I want to be toned.”

Scientifically speaking, ‘being toned’ isn’t some special thing.²² It’s simply sufficiently large muscle mass at a sufficiently low body fat %. Whether you want to look ‘big’ or ‘lean’ or ‘toned’ or ‘fit’ or ‘jacked’, the answer is always the same: follow the primary and secondary concepts to build muscle over time while targeting your preferred body fat %. If you just want to look ‘toned’, then you’re in luck, because that takes a lot less time than if you want to look ‘jacked’!

“Women shouldn’t go to the gym, or they will get too bulky.”

First of all, I think we can all agree this blanket sentiment is extremely problematic (why are we telling women what they should do or shouldn’t look like??). But second of all, it’s not even true! For the average woman to get the ‘bulky’ look of female body builders would take literally years of dedication. And the only way to get there is to first pass through the ‘toned’ look of a lower muscle mass, at which point anyone can choose to stop.

“If you just follow the right program, you can get jacked fast (AKA 10-week bootcamp).”

One of the big reasons the fitness industry sells so well is that people are impatient. We all want immediate results. But the unfortunate truth is that the gym bodies you see in film, social media, or at the beach generally took years of dedicated training. There is no magical shortcut. Remember the golden formula: Getting Jacked = Time * (0.6x+0.3y+0.1z)

“Do ab exercises to burn stomach fat.”

‘Spot reduction’ has been debunked for a long time now. Ab exercises will increase muscle size, which can improve definition and create the appearance of less body fat, but the only way to actually lower your body fat % is through careful dieting.²³

“I look so unfit compared to fitness influencers on social media.”

A huge number of fitness professionals are on TRT²⁴ at minimum or far more intensive regiments of steroids.²⁵ It’s effective, but dangerous. For the vast majority of amateur fitness enthusiasts, it is not worth pursuing. And, if you must compare your progress to others at all, it should be apples to apples against other natural lifters.

“You can look big without a shirt, or with a shirt. But you can’t look big in both.”

This one has a little more truth to it. It refers to looking big and strong in your clothes at the tail end of a bulk, at your heaviest- but you might look kind of fat in a swimsuit. But when you cut down to your leanest at the tail end of a cut and have lots of muscle definition in a swimsuit, you’ll look kind of small in your clothes. But the truth is that the majority of the country is extremely unfit! As long as you take a step back from comparing yourself to fitness influencers, it’s very likely that to most people you in fact look very impressive regardless of whether it’s at the beach or the cafe.

Conclusion

If you do 10-15 sets per muscle group each week, take each set close to failure (1 RIR), progressively increase the weight over time, eat anywhere close to 1g protein/lb. of lean body mass, and then ultimately cut to a lean body fat %, you will get jacked.

If on top of that, you train heavy compound lifts (squats, deadlifts, bench press, pull-ups) and follow a simple lifting plan like 5x5, you will get even more jacked.

If, after absolutely mastering all prior concepts, you want to spend enormous time and energy dialing in the exact rep ranges, isolation exercises, and supplements that makes the most difference to you, in order to fight tooth and nail for that last 10% of explanatory power over your results, then by all means go for it. But by this point, you will be so jacked that you could become a fitness influencer and sell your own supplements to the unsuspecting masses- a far better value proposition.

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Plastic Is Building Up In Human Brains, And Junk Food May Be Making It Worse

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:03:16 GMT

(Image by Shutterstock AI Image Generator)

By StudyFinds Analysis - Reviewed by John Anderer - Research led by Dr. Julio Licinio (Genomic Press)

In A Nutshell

Human brain tissue has been found to contain far more microplastics than other organs, with the highest levels in people diagnosed with dementia.
Ultra-processed foods, which make up more than half of calories consumed in the United States, are a major delivery vehicle for these plastic particles.
A blood-filtering medical procedure shows early promise as a way to remove microplastics from the body, but scientists say more measurement tools are needed before it can be confirmed to work.

A plastic spoon’s worth of tiny fragments, quietly accumulating inside the human brain. That image is no longer science fiction, it’s where a new scientific perspective begins, and it argues that the growing buildup of plastics in the human body is one of the most pressing brain health questions of the moment.

Prior research found that brain tissue from deceased donors contained concentrations of microplastics anywhere from seven to thirty times higher than what was found in their liver or kidney tissue. The brain may be the organ most saturated with this pollution. That burden grew by roughly 50% between 2016 and 2024, according to the same research. Donors who had been diagnosed with dementia carried the heaviest load of all.

A new scientific perspective published in the journal BrainHealth is pulling together what researchers know, what they still can’t measure, and what needs to happen next. A particular emphasis was placed on pregnant women, children, and people already living with brain or heart disease. The authors argue that the combination of high plastic levels in brain tissue, scientifically credible explanations for how those plastics cause harm, and a clear dietary source that most Americans consume daily makes this a brain health concern deserving urgent attention.

A Brain Saturated With Microplastics

Science has confirmed that microplastics and their even tinier counterparts, nanoplastics, have turned up in human blood, in the placenta during pregnancy, inside the fatty deposits that clog arteries, and in brain tissue. Plastic particles found in arterial deposits were associated with a roughly fourfold increase in the combined risk of heart attack, stroke, or death over a follow-up period of thirty-four weeks, according to research cited in the perspective. Since stroke is a brain event, the authors note that this finding carries direct relevance to brain health.

Why the brain accumulates so much more plastic than other organs may come down to size. In animal studies, nanoscale plastic particles crossed the brain’s protective filtering system, known as the blood-brain barrier, within two hours of being swallowed. Larger particles did not make it through. Only the smallest ones did. Once inside, how the brain clears them remains unknown.

The brain’s high fat content may also play a role in how these particles accumulate, though researchers note that this same quality makes the brain one of the hardest organs to test accurately for plastics. Measuring what’s actually in brain tissue, reliably and in a way the broader scientific community agrees on, remains an unsolved problem.

The human microplastic burden and brain health. Schematic and simplified overview of selected sources, exposure routes, mechanisms, and health impacts associated with microplastic and nanoplastic accumulation in the human body. (Credit: Julio Licinio)

The Junk Food Connection to Microplastics in the Brain

This is where the story gets uncomfortably familiar for most American households. Ultra-processed foods (soft drinks, packaged snacks, instant noodles, mass-produced bread, and ready-to-heat meals) now account for more than half of caloric intake in the United States. These are industrially manufactured products that barely resemble whole food ingredients. According to the perspective’s authors, they are one of the main ways plastic enters the human body.

Plastic-based packaging migrates into food during heating and storage. Industrial machinery used in processing causes plastic wear and contamination. By the time a packaged product reaches a consumer, it has had extensive contact with plastic at multiple stages. Whole foods encounter far less of it.

Evidence linking ultra-processed food to brain health problems comes from very large observational studies. One analysis of 385,541 participants found that higher consumption of ultra-processed food was associated with a 53% increase in the odds of common mental health disorder symptoms, a 44% increase for depression, and a 48% increase for anxiety. A separate large study using U.K. health data linked higher ultra-processed food consumption to an increased risk of dementia. Another study found that a 10% rise in ultra-processed food intake was associated with a 16% increase in the risk of thinking and memory problems and an 8% increase in stroke risk, and those associations held even after accounting for whether people followed well-regarded healthy eating patterns like the Mediterranean or DASH diets.

The authors are careful to note that ultra-processed foods are harmful for multiple reasons, including poor nutrition, food additives, and refined oils. But they argue that plastic content is one of the few candidate mechanisms that explains why ultra-processed food keeps showing up as a risk factor even when traditional nutritional measures are accounted for. These are observational findings, and they cannot on their own establish that plastics are causing the observed harms, but the authors view the pattern as worth taking seriously.

Can Plastic Be Removed From the Body?

Within the past year, a research group reported that a procedure called therapeutic apheresis (a clinical technique that filters a patient’s blood plasma outside the body, similar to dialysis) was able to extract material consistent with microplastic particles from human plasma. This was described as the first credible demonstration that an existing medical procedure might be able to engage these particles inside a living person.

Infrastructure for this procedure already exists at major medical centers around the world. The biological rationale is sound. But the authors are measured in their optimism. Without validated tools that can confirm how much plastic is actually being removed from plasma and tissue, and whether reducing plastic in the blood translates to less plastic in the brain, the signal from apheresis remains promising but preliminary.

There’s also the question of scale. This kind of procedure is resource-intensive and cannot realistically be made available to entire populations. People most at risk (pregnant women, children, workers with high exposure to plastics on the job, and patients already dealing with brain or heart disease) need solutions that reach them in everyday life, not just in specialized hospital settings.

A human brain composited against a landscape of plastic waste. The brain accumulates microplastic concentrations seven to thirty times higher than liver or kidney, with the heaviest burdens documented in donors with dementia. (Credit: Composite image created by Julio Licinio from two photographs licensed via Depositphotos.)

The Populations Who Can’t Wait

The perspective pays particular attention to groups facing compounded risk. Microplastics have been detected inside the placenta, the organ that sustains a developing baby, suggesting that exposure begins before birth, during the most sensitive window of brain development. Children face a longer lifetime of accumulation than adults and take in more plastic relative to their body weight. Workers in plastics manufacturing, recycling, textile production, and construction face high daily inhalation exposure and represent, in the authors’ view, an underutilized opportunity to study how dose relates to harm.

For patients already in neurological and cardiovascular care, the question the perspective raises is pointed: in people with dementia who show disproportionately high brain plastic loads, are those particles an innocent bystander, something that speeds up damage already underway, or an actual contributor to the disease? The authors do not claim to have the answer.

Three priorities emerge from the evidence. Standardized, reproducible methods for measuring plastic in brain tissue and in accessible biological samples are needed: without that, nothing else can be confirmed. Research also needs to move beyond general plastic toxicology and toward understanding which specific types of plastic, at which sizes, in which tissue cause which kinds of harm. Finally, removal strategies need to be tested against brain-relevant biological markers, with the apheresis finding as the anchor for a broader range of approaches.

For now, the one lever available at population scale, before any clinical removal method is validated, is cutting back on ultra-processed food consumption. The authors acknowledge this is not a simple ask, and that the science linking diet, plastics, and brain harm is still developing. But they argue it is the most actionable step currently available that matches the scale of the problem.

Brain plastic burden increased by approximately 50% in just eight years. If that pace continues, the consequences for population-level brain health could be substantial across generations. Researchers, clinicians, and public health officials are left with an urgent and still-unanswered question: what gets done about it before the numbers keep climbing?

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. The findings described are based on a scientific perspective paper that synthesizes existing research, including animal studies and large observational studies in humans; they do not establish that microplastics directly cause the health outcomes discussed. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making any changes to your diet, supplements, or medical care.

Paper Notes

Limitations

The authors are transparent about substantial gaps in the current science. Validated, reproducible methods for measuring microplastics in brain tissue do not yet exist at a level the broader scientific community accepts as a gold standard. Different laboratories use different techniques and get different results. Brain tissue is particularly difficult to analyze because of its high fat content, which interferes with processing methods, and because contamination from blood vessels in post-mortem samples is difficult to rule out. It is also unknown whether regional differences within the brain are significant — whether a measurement from one area generalizes to deeper structures. The relationship between plastic levels in the blood and plastic levels in the brain has not been established, meaning that blood-based removal procedures cannot yet be confirmed to reduce brain burden. The perspective also notes that the apheresis findings are preliminary and cannot be considered confirmed without the measurement standards that don’t yet exist. The authors emphasize throughout that the field is operating ahead of its own analytical tools.

Funding and Disclosures

The paper does not report specific external funding sources. One author, Stefan R. Bornstein, is disclosed as serving on the Scientific Advisory Board of Ayus Medical Devices. All other authors declared no conflicts of interest related to this manuscript.

Publication Details

Authors: Julio Licinio, Charlotte Steenblock, Nicholas Fabiano, Stefan R. Bornstein, and Ma-Li Wong | Affiliations: GenomicPress, New York, New York; Department of Internal Medicine III, University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany; University of Ottawa, Department of Psychiatry, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; School of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine and Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine, King’s College London, UK; Department of Endocrinology, Diabetology and Clinical Nutrition, University Hospital Zurich and University of Zurich, Switzerland | Journal: BrainHealth (GenomicPress) | Article Type: Perspective | Title: “The human microplastic burden and brain health: From measurement to pathophysiology and removal” | DOI: 10.61373/bh026p.0006 | Published online: May 5, 2026

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The greatest theft in history (part 2)

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Fri, 08 May 2026 11:48:39 GMT

by Darby Jones

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it took Deep Thought 7.5 million years to calculate the answer to life, the universe, and everything. I discovered the answer this year at the age of 42.* That asterisk is crucial. It’s actually the answer, but it means nothing if you don’t ask the right question.

Who’s in control?

Nothing will stop the mega-rich from controlling their political puppets and distracting us from looking up. Look around. Neighbors fighting over jobs, healthcare, housing — your brother-in-law skipped Thanksgiving … again. Half your Facebook feed has written off the other half as deplorable monsters.

The world’s a mess, but the reason your dollar can’t buy a nickel has nothing to do with the Left or Right. Follow the money. Look up at the power keeping us down.

Power /pau̇(-ə)r/: 1. Fractional reserve banking. 2. The Fed. 3. Global “mafia.”

People /pē-pəl/: 1. Everyone who gets their dollar after The Fed spends it.

Power took $350 TRILLION from the People

Look at the greatest thefts in human history. Wars. Empires. Gulags. Now look at #1. The Fed, running continuously since 1913, beats everything else on that list by 8 times.

Private bankers and their cronies profit from spending the dollar at full value before it depreciates. Then we pay the price via inflation.

$350 trillion is hard to grasp, so to bring it home:

The average American worker making $60K per year loses 2.7 million in purchasing power over a 45.5-year career and 20-year retirement.¹

That’s roughly 113.7% of lifetime earnings in this model. It’s a slow boil. We don’t question the heat if it slowly rises for 65 years. Politicians and bankers know the masses won’t keep track. They cleverly passed the scheme into law on Dec. 23, while 27 other congressmen (who opposed the racket) had left for Christmas break.

“The Federal Reserve system was designed by bankers, for bankers. The 1913 Federal Reserve Act was drafted at a secret meeting at Jekyll Island, Georgia, attended by reps from J.P. Morgan, the Rockefeller interests, and the National City Bank of New York. The resulting institution grants private banks the exclusive privilege of creating money through lending — a privilege enforced by the federal government and backstopped by taxpayer-funded deposit insurance.”¹

Politicians and bankers (one organism) claim they created the Fed to prevent global financial crises, but really, they just figured out a clever way to socialize mass theft. If Americans can’t understand it, we can’t protest. Or we’ll protest, but we won’t know who to blame. Politicians then use our ignorance to blame the other “side.” Both “sides” benefit from the same evil. As their theft compounds, so does our hate for each other.

The real battle is not Left vs. Right. It’s always been Up vs. Down.

From 2020 to 2024 alone, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that Americans lost 20% of their purchasing power.² If four years cost you a fifth of your purchasing power, imagine 113 years of the same machinery running.

Under an honest monetary system, your dollars should gain purchasing power as productivity improves. Things would get better and cheaper if we weren’t printing “monopoly” money.

Healthcare costs 17% of GDP and is climbing. A house costs 16 times what it cost your parents. Tuition is up 1,200% since 1980.

If the average American had that $2.7 million, they wouldn’t be fighting with their neighbors. We’d live as we did in the ‘50s when we had disagreements, but could still be friends.

Both parties (and any human) will “print” money if it’s legal. But robbing the middle class and the poor to make the insanely rich more powerful is pure evil.

Ron Paul said it a million times. It’s time to…

END THE FED!

My people. You aren’t dumb. You were just taught to trust the system. Your government-run education will NEVER teach anything this incriminating. Plus, new worldviews challenge your entire way of life. Even if you’re curious, nobody has time to read 113 years of monetary extraction data. It’s why my source summarized the scheme into fun visuals with plenty of snark to keep you entertained. Give her a try.

Similarly, most folks don’t have the time (or tears) to read 50 pages of derivatives litigation to prove that Naked Shorting is a thing. It’s why part 1 in my greatest theft series, boils it down into simple terms. Restack it if you can.

This is why we write. Artists and authors write the words that others can’t quite articulate.

This whole mess is what happens when you let bankers architect society. I’m a banker, so I should know. Please don’t hate me. It’s just my 9-to-5. It’s how I feed my kids. But now that I understand the system, I have a moral responsibility to tell you. Join me. Join the cause and subscribe.

First: Disillusionment.

Second: Hope.

Third: Freedom.

What’s the answer?

The answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide had it right all along. What you don’t know is that in nerd language, 42 represents the asterisk.

42 = *

That single, solitary star is the answer. It’s the “master key” in computer programming – a wildcard. An asterisk can stand in for anything. One might conclude that it represents total freedom.

The answer has always been freedom – in our lives and in every interaction.

Who’s in control? I am. You are. We all have the right to be free.

It took me 42 years to figure it out, but here we are, solving the secret mysteries of the universe together.

If you know, you know.

Power to the People

American ingenuity is just about the only thing saving us from politicians driving us off a cliff.

“Thomas Edison brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. The Wright brothers got us off the ground, not the Aviation Administration. Henry Ford ended the isolation of Americans by making cars affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who helped Americans the most didn’t go around loudly expressing ‘compassion’ for the poor. They found ways to make things more productive, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.” ~Thomas Sowell

Don’t thank Big Gov. Thank the people and honest industry for bailing us out.

Headlines of Hope

People advancing technology will save us again. There are thousands of unsung heroes hidden from the news. Corporate media knows the behavioral science – that fear weighs (and pays) twice as much as anything resembling hope, so of course they sell terror 24-7. But it’s only half the story.

I recently finished a 5-year project collecting all the good news in the world (and Far Side Cartoons)! It’s all tech, energy, and medical “miracles” that prove we can self-organize and save ourselves.

Government monopolies destroy entire nations, but smaller decentralized systems are easier to manage. Anarchy was never a society without laws. By definition, it’s a society without rulers. Anarchists replace slave owners with leaders, elders, and arbiters.

Most of the same laws and precedents developed over thousands of years would not only be practiced, but also enhanced via competing polycentric legal systems or networks that you can freely start, join, or leave.

Christopher Cook is writing a brilliant book exclusively on Substack called The Distributed Nation about how voluntary systems can replace centralized control. His ideas around polycentric law are especially enlightening. Who will build the roads? He’s got the answer. France already privatized 70% of their roads, and they’re immaculate. Toll roads. Competitive contracts. Simple.

A voluntarist society must be built on persuasion (not coercion), so it’ll take decades and likely an economic collapse or two to evolve into a new paradigm.

But we can start changing the definitions today!

Power: Freedom*

People: Sovereign individuals.

Find your inner asterisk. You are your own sovereign star.

If you think anarchy is crazy, no worries. Just do one thing for me. Pick a cause, any cause, and support it … fiscally. Be the change. Struggling financially? Donate time. Build awareness. Share your beliefs. I’m trying to get people to believe in themselves, so help me spread hope, wonder, and love — forget anarchy if it sounds silly.

Or BE SILLY with me and DON’T PANIC! Carry a towel.

Please like, comment, and restack:

Darby Jones | Fraternal Youth

Headlines of Hope

Shootings, oil spills, wars, and famine. It’s time to balance the scales…

8 months ago · 1165 likes · 177 comments · Darby Jones

Darby Jones | Fraternal Youth

The greatest theft in history (part 1)

Naked shorting is killing America … but there’s HOPE in ACTION…

a month ago · 216 likes · 67 comments · Darby Jones

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The truth about State Farm

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Fri, 08 May 2026 11:03:03 GMT

by Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby

In an ad campaign that has blanketed the airwaves this year, State Farm compares itself to a sleazy fictional competitor, Halfway There Insurance. The commercial features two popular comedic actors, Danny McBride and Keegan Michael Key, riffing to the Bon Jovi classic, Livin’ on a Prayer.

“There’s damage to your home on this block,” McBride and Key croon. “We won’t make things right, cuz filing a claim is tough.” The comedy duo stresses that, unlike State Farm, their pretend company will not live up to its promises and does not care about customer satisfaction. “So forget what we told you. It ain’t worth squat. It doesn’t make a difference if you’re happy or not,” they sing.

A website created by State Farm, HalfwayThereInsurance.com, jokes that Halfway There Insurance will just claim that home damage is not their responsibility. For “actual home protection,” the website advises, “we’d say go with State Farm.”

No expense is spared on the campaign, which debuted during the Super Bowl. The ad concludes when Jon Bon Jovi himself, riding in a red convertible with State Farm pitchman “Jake,” offers a disgruntled Halfway There customer, played by actress Hailee Steinfeld, a lift. “Stop living on a prayer and get State Farm,” Jake says.

The Halfway There campaign is one of countless ads with a similar message: State Farm is a relatable and ethical company that will be there to assist you when you need them. “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there,” is the company’s iconic slogan. According to a document filed with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and obtained by Popular Information, State Farm spent an astounding $1.139 billion on advertising in 2025.

According to an enforcement action filed by the California Department of Insurance (CDI) this week, the experience of being a State Farm customer has little in common with the advertising copy. CDI “announced a major enforcement action against State Farm General Insurance Company after an expedited investigation uncovered significant mishandling of insurance claims filed by survivors of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires.” According to CDI Commissioner Ricardo Lara, “State Farm delayed, underpaid, and buried policyholders in red tape at the worst moment of their lives.”

As part of the investigation, CDI examiners reviewed a sampling of 220 claims. In more than half the claims (114) CDI determined that State Farm violated state law. In a legal filing known as an “Order to Show Cause,” CDI summarized State Farm’s violations:

The examination showed a troubling pattern of claims handling practices by [State Farm], including: slow and inadequate investigations of claims; underpayment of claims; numerous instances where multiple claims adjusters were assigned, over a short period, causing policyholder confusion; a lack of reasonable standards for prompt investigation and processing of claims, including in regards to smoke damage; and/or, delayed or inadequate communication with policyholders. These practices failed to comply with applicable laws regulating the fair handling of claims and related regulations resulting in unfair and unlawful burden to policyholders during a declared state of emergency.

The CDI is seeking authority to suspend State Farm’s license in California for up to a year. That would mean the company could not write new insurance policies during that time.

State Farm flatly rejected the conclusions of the CDI investigation. “California’s homeowners insurance market is the most dysfunctional in the country, and State Farm has worked to be part of real solutions,” the company said in a statement. “Wildfire survivors deserve real solutions - not a distorted picture of State Farm’s response.”

The investigation revealed a more nuanced picture. State Farm denied fault in some cases but admitted fault in others, “often saying that the problem was due to issues with specific adjusters.”

According to CDI, State Farm could face $2 million or more in penalties. $2 million represents less than one day of State Farm’s annual ad budget.

State Farm aggressively pursued the California home insurance market

In the years before the wildfires, as other insurers were more cautious in California, State Farm blitzed the market, even while being aware of the risks.

A 2025 report from the Wall Street Journal found that, in the years after the COVID-19 pandemic, State Farm “gobbled up market share… by insuring high-value homes in the Pacific Palisades and other Los Angeles neighborhoods that many of its competitors rejected as too vulnerable to wildfires.” In 2023, the company took in “$2.7 billion of home-insurance premiums in the state,” a 70% increase compared to five years earlier.

“State Farm was the only—and I mean the only—big insurer that would take everything” during that time period, an owner of an independent insurance agency told the Journal. One insurance agent said that the only quote that he could get for a high-value home in 2022 was $20,000, until State Farm insured it for $6,000.

State Farm knew about the risks even as it expanded. According to the Journal, consultants told State Farm that there was a high risk of a fire. State Farm also knew it was selling policies that had unsustainably low premiums. But it continued to ask California “for a fraction of the increases that would be needed to bring its rates up to the necessary levels” in 2021 and 2022.

In 2023, that abruptly changed. State Farm began asking the state for much higher increases in home-insurance rates. Shortly after, the company announced that it would no longer be accepting new home-insurance policies in California.

In March 2024, State Farm announced that it would be dropping coverage for a total of 72,000 houses and apartments in the state beginning that summer. A CDI spokesman told CBS that around “1,600 policies in Pacific Palisades were dropped by State Farm in July.” An analysis by CBS News San Francisco found that State Farm dropped over 2,000 policies in two other zip codes in Los Angeles. Customers whose policies were not being renewed were advised to get insurance through California’s Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plan, which is used as a last resort and typically offers less coverage for a higher price.

In January 2025, State Farm reversed course and announced that it was offering to renew residential policies that it had intended to drop in Los Angeles County. But the decision only applied to policies that were still held by customers before the Los Angeles fires. Customers whose coverage had already been dropped before the fire are out of luck.

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Etienne on The Corbett Report - #SolutionsWatch - How to Deal with "Authorities"

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:02:30 GMT

When DO you call the cops and when (and HOW!) can you deal with situations without them. A listener wrote in to The Corbett Report to ask when, if and how voluntaryists and the liberty minded should engage with representatives of the state. James recruits some voluntaryists and special guests to respond. The panels includes: James Corbett of corbettreport.com, Ryan Cristian of TheLastAmericanVagabond.com, Derrick Broze of TheConsciousResistance.com Steve Poikonen of AM Wakeup, Hakeem Anwar of AbovePhone.com, Kit Knightly of Off-Guardian.org, Ernest Hancock of FreedomsPhoenix.com, Etienne de La Boetie² of TheArtOfLiberty.org, Larken Rose of TheRoseChannel.com

For a Reminder of WHY you almost NEVER want to Call the Cops, here is some Truth Music from our uncensorable flash drive of Freedom: The Liberator

This is What Happens When You Call the Cops! by Rob Hustle feat. Bump It is being soft-censored with age restriction on YouTube. Get the non age restricted version on Bitchute here: https://www.bitchute.com/video/ciEp8IvXzuDB/

The sequel video to: This is What Happens When You Call the Cops by Rob Hustle in response to all the folks who said: “But What About All the Good Cops”?

One Powerful Solution to Police Accountability

The #THICKREDLINE Project

The THICKREDLINE Project is an effort to restore respect for law enforcement by abolishing victimless crime. Victimless crimes are not really crimes… and make the cops the criminals. A real crime, by definition, has a perpetrator and a victim: murder, assault, rape, theft, and extortion are all obvious crimes because there is a victim. Politicians and bureaucrats frequently institute illogical, immoral and counter-productive “laws” (politician scribbles) that penalize peaceful, non-violent people for “crimes” that have no victim. Drug possession, gambling, and making arrests for ignoring Covid-19 lockdown and social distancing orders are examples of victimless crimes where politicians attempt to get the police to use violence immorally and preemptively on overwhelmingly peaceful people frequently to raise revenue or enforce their version of morality on a population. When the police use violence and coercion against peaceful people for victimless crimes (there is simply no way to sugar-coat this) it makes the cops the criminals who are engaged in kidnapping and extortion under the color of law. The THICKREDLINE Project is organizing the police to say: NO! to the organized crime “government” on lockdowns, mask mandates and other victimless crimes.

IMPORTANT: Our THICKREDLINE domain was stolen in what we believe is a dirty tricks campaign. Evidently, powerful forces don’t want Sheriffs and police to understand they have the ability to say: NO!, organize collectively, and refuse to use violence on peaceful people for politicians!

About The Author

Etienne de la Boetie² is the founder of the Art of Liberty Foundation and an internationally recognized expert and speaker on voluntaryism and government illegitimacy, criminality, and corruption. He is the author of “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! – How Inter-Generational Organized Crime Runs the “Government,”Media and Academia and To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many, and the editor of the Art of Liberty Daily News and Five Meme Friday, which delivers hard-hitting voluntaryist memes and the best of the alternative media. His original writing and research can be found at ArtOfLiberty.Foundation and, in Spanish, at ArteDeLaLibertad.org.

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Simplicius Iran War Update: US's Latest "Project Freedom" Boondoggle Sinks in Less Than a Day

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:58:14 GMT

by Simplicius

The carnival is in its last season, and it’s beginning to show its age, appearing at times both erratic and woefully rehearsed to exasperated audiences.

The latest spectacle saw Trump launch an ill-fated and ill-planned ‘Project Freedom’, a kind of freedom of navigation gimmick in Hormuz, which immediately flopped hours later when US destroyers attempting to cross the strait were targeted by Iran.

The entire charade was particularly confused: for instance, the US official “guidance” for this bizarro stunt essentially told daring vessels to “chance it” through Omani territorial waters in the hopes it would avoid Iranian strikes.

This was a desperate US ploy, used before, to try and give the strait an appearance of being “opened” by begging commercial traffic to volunteer as guinea pigs and meatshields-in-one in the hopes that nothing is hit.

Unfortunately, a major oil tanker was immediately hit precisely near Omani waters, and the Project Freedom boondoggle instantly toppled like a used stack of dollar-store toilet paper rolls.

Trump likewise proceeded to fold like a two-shekel suit to riotous international laughter:

With Rubio announcing the end of Operation Epic Fury:

Trump’s most sycophantic media arschleckers plunged into Defcon 1-levels of damage control, floating desperate excuses for the flop. The most comical was Jesse Watters’ cerebral take:

Fox Host Jesse Watters suggests Trump’s pausing of Project Freedom is due to Trump not wanting Iran to be humiliated so they can surrender

“The President must know what he’s doing”

The full statement, if you need a belly-laugh:

“We suspect the president is letting the Iranians save face. The enemy just yesterday said they control the Strait - that was obviously a lie. And watching the Americans escort ship after ship out of the Gulf, and them not being able to do anything about that, was gonna be humiliating. Not only were they going to lose whatever military prestige they had left in the region - their negotiators weren’t going to be able to fight for their position after they lost their last bargaining chip. The commander in chief must believe that the Iranians are serious about surrendering, if he’s gonna pause (*stutters) Project Freedom for the sake of the deal. Because you could also continue Project Freedom during the negotiations - you know, you do want to get these foreign ships moving - the president must know what he’s doing. And we’re about to find out, how insane in the brain the regime really is.

Imagine swallowing that?

Trump angled to save face with another threat that hit like a deflated whoopie-cushion:

The problem with his “successful blockade” theory is that it’s become increasingly apparent that Iran’s oil storage is no where near depleting. Just like figures for Iranian losses keep being “revised” down, the countdown for Iran’s storage keeps going up. Originally it was 12 days left, then 14, then 20, now up to 45:

Recall the 15 day prediction from April 21, and the new 25-30 day prediction from a top oil analyst:

New satellite photos corroborate, as Kharg Island was seen with a plethora of empty storage tanks remaining:

Satellites also picked up many new VLCCs getting loaded up:

Iranian experts explained that Iran is able to “reduce production without having difficulty with storage.”

“Iran can balance production, storage, export and domestic production in a way that doesn’t need to shut down oil wells… Iran’s petroleum industry won’t allow oil wells sit idle.”

Gee, who would’ve thought?

One of the ways, as I understand it, is that Iran is able to shift ~2 million bpd production almost entirely toward domestic use, without needing to export much of it in order to weather the storm. That said, tankers continue to allegedly get through according to some reports, as a kind of ‘quiet’ or even unspoken deal between Iran and the US may have been in place to allow both sides to get a little PR breathing room for their domestic audiences.

Some unverified reports had claimed Iran let a couple tankers pass to give the US Navy escort credit, and in return the US turned a blind eye to some Iranian tankers slipping through its “impenetrable” blockade as well.

The economic costs—and otherwise—are continually adding up for the waffling US. Two US soldiers were reported “missing” off the coast of “Morocco”, but according to the White House the Golden Age is proceeding swimmingly:

Well, Russia too isn’t doing so bad, according to Bloomberg:

Russian federal budget revenues from oil sales reached a six-month high, Bloomberg reports
▪️707.1 billion rubles: Russia’s federal budget revenues from mineral extraction tax receipts in April. This is the highest level since October of last year. Total revenues from oil and gas sales amounted to 856 billion rubles, Bloomberg states.
▪️Russia is benefiting from the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East. The price of Urals crude, used to calculate the tax amount, stood at $77 per barrel in April. A year earlier, it was at $59
▪️Russian budget revenues in May will be calculated based on even higher Urals crude prices, around $95 per barrel

While outlets continue leaking the truth about US’s true impact on the Iranian nuclear program:

The Atlantic’s new piece praises Iran for its unexpected gumption—unexpected to whom, exactly, one wonders?

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/05/iran-unexpected-resilience-devastated-military/687069/

But what the piece highlights is that Iran was specifically able to steer the conflict to revolve around Iranian strengths.

Atlantic concludes:

Even in its diminished state, the Iranian military has managed to deter enemy ships and outmaneuver anti-air systems, maintaining that grip on the strait while costing the U.S. billions.
Although Trump insists that Iran has been completely destroyed and that the war is over, reality suggests otherwise. After two months of war with a superpower, Iran is in some respects outmatched: The U.S. said it bombed more than 13,000 targets during Operation Epic Fury. Yet Iran has refused to concede, even as hundreds of its own civilians have died and the rest have suffered from an economic crisis. U.S. efforts to fully degrade Iran’s defensive capacities may ultimately end up succeeding. But the longer Iran is able to inflict economic pain across the world, and the longer its depleted defensive capabilities hold, the more evidence its leaders have that it can continue to stand firm.

Well, this is why the most enterprising and intelligent folk read independent outlets like this one here, rather than zioshill-owned corporate lackey chambers like the Atlantic—because virtually everything being “discovered” by them just now was long known to us and expounded on here before the conflict even began.

The article points out Iran’s ability to steer the conflict asymmetrically towards its own strengths. This is interesting in light of a newly-uncovered video from the ‘90s showing the Iranian IRGC University preaching precisely that:

In the 1990s, at the IRGC University of Command and Staff, future commander Hossein Salami - now a martyr - taught a course on asymmetric warfare. He instructed officers on prolonging a conflict with the US by escalating economic costs and political instability. Even then, they were already plotting the downfall of the evil empire.

Now the administration of dejected-looking flunkies has been resigned to literally begging the UN to step in and “help” do what the US Navy has proven woefully incapable of—an unprecedented prestige-blow to the US military ‘machine’:

It’s only fitting then that when Iranian FM spokesman Esmail Baghaei was asked why Iran isn’t backing down in the face of the inimitable American “superpower”, this was his response:

Q: “Why Iran doesn’t back down when America is a superpower?”
Iran’s FM spokesperson Baghaei: “We are a superpower too.”

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Insane Pre-Crime Strategy Unveiled for Leftist "Extremists" including "Anarchists"

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:48:27 GMT

Etienne Note: The organized crime “government” has deceitfully lumped anarchists, people who don’t believe in the legitimacy, desirability or necessity of “government” in with Leftist Extremists and Anti-Fascists. It is deceitful because as I have broken down in detail, in my article: The Fake Left-Right Paradigm - What is the REAL Political Spectrum the Monopoly Media is Hiding?, how the organized crime “government” and monopoly media present a fake-left right political spectrum to hide the REAL political spectrum from the population because it exposes the authoritarian nature of the “government” in relation to REAL freedom (vs. the Fake Freedom taught in the mandatory schools and extoled by the monopolized media.

Insane Pre-Crime Strategy Unveiled for Leftist “Extremists”

Sebastian Gorka

by Ken Klippenstein

The White House declared war on the American people today, labeling its political opponents as terrorists, including “Left-wing extremists.” The new label also claims that there are “deepening alliances” between “the far-left and Islamists” — or pro-Palestinian protesters.

The language is contained in the White House’s newly released National Counterterrorism Strategy. It is the first National Strategy to be unveiled since 2021, when the Biden administration issued its document. The Strategy identifies the “left-wing,” “anti-Fascists,” “Anarchists” and “radically pro-transgender” ideologies as threats equivalent to jihadi groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, or narco-traffickers.

The Strategy is the brainchild of White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, an eccentric figure I have reported on, who last year hinted at terrorism charges being levied for political opponents of the administration. The document makes clear he got his wish. Gorka called the Strategy “my life’s work,” and apparently waxed so poetic in previous drafts that his superiors told him (by his own account): “Cut it down, Gorka!”

“Currently we face three major types of terror groups,” the Strategy says, listing “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs,” “Legacy Islamist Terrorists,” and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.”

2026 Usct Strategy Pdf

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“Counterterrorism” itself is a propaganda term, sanitizing the actual practice: pre-crime, which aims to build cases against people for what they might do, most ominously based on speech or beliefs. (I’ve written about the Bureau’s pre-crime push at length.) The Strategy doesn’t bother hiding it. It promises to “Identify terror actors and plots before they happen” and to use “law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.”

The Strategy also hints at a crackdown on pro-Palestinian groups. In a section laying out “five functional aspects of the current CT environment” beyond the previously named three categories, it warns of “New and deepening alliances between the far-left and Islamists, i.e., the ‘Red-Green’ alliance” — a phrase borrowed from conservative discourse to suggest a conspiratorial alignment between the American left and radical Islam.

The “Red-Green alliance” term has been pushed by Israeli think tanks like the Reut Group — which defines the term as “the nexus between radical progressive groups to Islamists organizations” — and picked up by right-wing U.S. news outlets. The framing is designed to recast pro-Palestinian activism as a front for jihadism.

The Strategy proposes employing the same tactics used to map out jihadi networks like al Qaeda against Americans here at home, promising “rapid identification and neutralization” of the supposed threat. This is exactly the technique that Gorka and other top Trump officials like Kash Patel cut their teeth on during the post-9/11 global war on terror — experience that I previously warned they would lean heavily on.

Per the document:

“In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national CT [counterterrorism] activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist. We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.”

National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) defines the threat as those espousing “anti-American,” “anti-Christian” and “anti-Capitalism” viewpoints. The new National Strategy uniquely identifies “radically pro-transgender ideologies” as terrorists, adding yet another threat group to the federal government’s targeting.

As I reported last year, the FBI in response to Charlie Kirk’s murder was preparing a war on what it considers transgender “extremism,” based on my sources. That report was subject to endless fact-checks asking how I knew this — something I can’t answer without burning my sources — and whether I was spreading panic in the transgender community. The counterterrorism strategy affirms my reporting, explicitly pointing to “the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies” as part of its justification for the new targeting.

The Strategy is, in important respects, Charlie Kirk’s strategy. Within hours of his September 10, 2025 murder at Utah Valley University, White House, Justice, and Homeland Security officials scrambled to draft a sweeping domestic crackdown, as I previously reported. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the killing “a domestic 9/11,” vowing his department would now do to American political networks what it once did to al Qaeda’s in going after their finances.

Charlie Kirk was not just an ally of the new terror hunters. Trump reportedly considered the 31-year-old Turning Point USA co-founder part of his “extended family,” in his words, with a direct line to the Oval Office that few others enjoyed. The President credited Kirk with delivering young voters in 2024, posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom on what would have been his 32nd birthday, and used his February 2026 State of the Union to mourn “my great friend Charlie Kirk,” with Kirk’s widow Erika seated in the chamber as a special guest.

Kirk’s death resulted in the issuance of NSPM-7, on which much of the new counterterrorism Strategy is built.

The new Strategy also leans heavily on grievances about the “weaponization” of counterterrorism powers under prior administrations to justify a sweeping expansion of those same powers. It cites past FBI controversies — surveillance of “conservative Catholics attending traditional mass in Virginia,” “parents standing up for their children at school board meetings,” and investigations of “Members of Congress, or President Trump and his associates” — as the rationale for what it calls a previous “radical shift” in U.S. counterterrorism.

In other words: abuses of counterterrorism authorities against the right have now become the grounds for unleashing those same authorities against the left.

The Strategy anticipates this reversal and tries to inoculate against it. “Our counterterrorism powers will not be used to target our fellow Americans who simply disagree with us,” it insists, before going on to describe a regime that does precisely that — provided the disagreement is categorized as “extremism.”

Except that’s exactly what it does!

The strategy includes a foreword by President Trump that emphasizes its unparalleled focus on the homeland: “my Administration has put an unprecedented focus on dismantling threats to the American homeland in our Hemisphere.”

The global war on terror has come home.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

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Alcohol At Any Dose Causes Cancer, Violence, And Shrinks Your Brain

Etienne de la Boetie2 — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:40:18 GMT

Etienne Note: In Jason Christoff’s documentary Planet Mind Control he breaks down how Hollywood is subliminally advertising drugs like caffeine and alcohol into their content to weaken the population so they can be effectively tax farmed. In my review of the documentary, Planet Mind Control - Documentary on What Hollywood is Inserting Subliminally into Movies and TV, I break down how they are inserting Statism into movies and tell-a-vision as well.

by Robert Yoho, MD

READER RESOURCES: THE APOCALYPSE ALMANAC: Hidden cures in our dystopian age. Check out the “Cure Cancer in Your Kitchen” chapter. FULLSCRIPT SUPPLEMENTS: top quality and economical.

Summary

• Alcohol kills roughly 178,000 Americans per year, more than all illicit drugs combined, yet its producers spend $2 billion annually on advertising with almost no regulatory pushback.

• The “safe at moderate doses” doctrine, often cited as 1 to 3 drinks per day, has been systematically dismantled by the 2018 Global Burden of Disease study and subsequent research confirming that no safe level of consumption exists.

• Alcohol is the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States; it drives cancer at 7 distinct tissue sites, atrophies the brain with as few as 1 to 2 drinks per day in women, and triggers cardiovascular damage that the industry’s “French paradox” mythology long concealed.

• The global alcohol industry, dominated by a handful of conglomerates including AB InBev, Diageo, and Pernod Ricard, funds the research that downplays its harms, finances political lobbying at every level of government, and has embedded itself in public health organizations the way Pharma embedded itself in medical journals.

• Alcohol use disorder (AUD) affects 28.9 million Americans; fewer than 10% ever receive treatment, and the pharmacological tools that work, naltrexone and acamprosate, are prescribed at a fraction of the rate at which antidepressants are doled out for far less disabling conditions.

• Alcohol accounts for 30% of all fatal traffic crashes in the United States, contributes to at least 55% of domestic violence incidents, causes fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs) in an estimated 1 to 5% of Americans, and fuels a ski resort injury economy where on-mountain medical clinics profit from the impairment the industry created.

The manufactured permission slip

During the 1970s, we physicians in training heard the lecture repeatedly: a drink or two a day protects the heart. The evidence was “solid.” Red wine, in particular, was said to possess almost magical properties; its resveratrol and polyphenols were supposed to offset the toxicity of the ethanol it contained. France drank heavily and lived long. QED.

That story was wrong, and the people who promoted it knew it was at best incomplete. Forty years of research have since demolished the moderate-drinking hypothesis with the thoroughness it deserved. The 2018 Global Burden of Disease study, published in The Lancet, analyzed data from 195 countries and reached a conclusion that left no room for negotiation: the safest level of alcohol consumption is zero. Not one drink per day. Not a glass of wine with dinner. Zero.

That finding did not end the debate. The industry funded counter-analyses. Compliant academics circulated op-eds. The New York Times health desk ran soothing pieces about Mediterranean diets. The “one to two drinks” permission slip survives in popular culture the way bloodletting survived for centuries after the evidence against it accumulated: because moneyed interests needed it to survive.

What ethanol is

Ethanol (C2H5OH) is a two-carbon alcohol and a central nervous system (CNS) depressant. It crosses the blood-brain barrier within minutes of ingestion. Its primary mechanism involves potentiating gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) receptors, the brain’s main inhibitory system, while suppressing N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) glutamate receptors, the primary excitatory pathway. The result is the familiar loosening of inhibition, slowed reaction time, impaired judgment, and, at sufficient doses, unconsciousness and death.

The liver metabolizes ethanol primarily via alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) to acetaldehyde, a compound the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classifies as a Group 1 human carcinogen. Acetaldehyde is then converted by aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) into acetate, which is excreted harmlessly. The problem is that acetaldehyde accumulates faster than ALDH clears it, above all in people with genetic variants of ALDH2, roughly half of East Asian populations, who experience flushing, nausea, and tachycardia after even small amounts of alcohol. That reaction is not an allergy. It is the unmasked toxicity that ethanol metabolism produces in everyone, made visible because the clearance step is broken.

Ethanol’s half-life in blood is approximately 4 to 5 hours in a non-tolerant adult who has consumed one standard drink, but that figure is misleading. The liver processes roughly one standard drink per hour; binge drinking, defined by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) as 4 drinks in 2 hours for women and 5 for men, overwhelms this capacity entirely. Blood alcohol concentration (BAC) climbs faster than the body metabolizes it, explaining why impairment persists hours after the last drink.

Chronic heavy drinkers develop tolerance through receptor downregulation, meaning the CNS compensates for persistent GABA enhancement by reducing receptor sensitivity. Withdrawal from alcohol then becomes a medical emergency: without the drug’s artificial GABA stimulation, the excitatory system runs unchecked, producing seizures, delirium tremens (DTs), and death at rates that far exceed opioid withdrawal. Alcohol withdrawal kills. Heroin withdrawal does not, as a rule.

The numbers the industry prefers not to discuss

Alcohol kills approximately 178,000 Americans each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That figure encompasses alcohol-associated liver disease, cardiovascular events, cancers, motor vehicle crashes, falls, homicides, and suicides. It dwarfs the annual death toll from all illicit drug overdoses combined (about 107,000 in 2023, itself a record driven by fentanyl) and exceeds annual deaths from diabetes.

28.9 million Americans met the diagnostic criteria for AUD in 2023, per NIAAA data. That is roughly 1 in 9 adults. Among adults aged 18 to 25, the rate reaches 1 in 5. AUD is not a behavioral failing. It is a neurological disorder driven by the same receptor downregulation and dopaminergic sensitization that characterizes addiction to other CNS drugs. The brain of a person with AUD differs measurably from a non-dependent brain in imaging, in receptor density, and in the expression of genes governing stress response.

Fewer than 10% of people with AUD receive any treatment in a given year. Compare this to treatment rates for comparable conditions: roughly 60% of people with hypertension receive medication. The disparity reflects stigma, a treatment infrastructure still dominated by 12-step ideology rather than evidence-based pharmacology, and the fact that the disorder’s primary driver, the alcohol industry, has every incentive to leave it untreated.

Economic costs are conservatively estimated at $249 billion per year in the United States alone, covering lost workplace productivity, healthcare expenditures, and criminal justice costs. The global figure exceeds $1.6 trillion annually. For comparison, the entire global annual revenue of the alcohol industry is approximately $1.6 trillion. The industry’s externalized costs, paid by taxpayers, healthcare systems, and families, equal its entire gross revenue.

A brief history of alcohol in America

Alcohol predates recorded American history; fermentation technology arrived with the first European colonists and expanded aggressively. By the early 19th century, per-capita alcohol consumption reached levels that stagger the modern imagination: roughly 7 gallons of pure ethanol per person per year, compared to 2.5 gallons today. The temperance movement, driven largely by women experiencing domestic violence and economic ruin at the hands of drinking husbands, built for decades before achieving Prohibition in 1920 with the 18th Amendment.

Prohibition, routinely dismissed as a failure, produced a 50% reduction in liver cirrhosis deaths, a documented reduction in domestic violence, and measurable improvements in workplace productivity. Its repeal in 1933 reflected the industry’s political and financial power more than any coherent public health argument. The narrative of Prohibition’s failure, starring Al Capone and speakeasies, was written by the people who profited from repeal.

Post-Prohibition, the alcohol industry rebuilt itself as a normal consumer goods business, aligning with Hollywood, sports, and eventually with health researchers. The “J-curve” hypothesis, suggesting that light to moderate drinkers had better cardiovascular outcomes than abstainers, emerged in the 1980s and spread rapidly. Subsequent analysis found that many abstainers in the comparison groups were former heavy drinkers who had quit because of illness, a confounding factor so significant it invalidated most of the literature supporting moderate drinking’s benefits.

Studies that use genetic variants in alcohol-metabolizing enzymes to separate drinking behavior from confounders have consistently found no cardiovascular benefit from moderate alcohol consumption. The J-curve was a statistical artifact, and the researchers who pointed this out for decades faced a wall of industry-funded opposition.

Cancer: the connection the industry buried

The IARC classifies ethanol as a Group 1 carcinogen, the highest classification, meaning causation is established beyond reasonable scientific doubt. Alcohol causes cancer at 7 anatomical sites: the mouth, pharynx, larynx, esophagus, liver, colon and rectum, and the female breast. The mechanisms are multiple: acetaldehyde damages DNA directly; ethanol disrupts folate metabolism required for DNA repair; it increases estrogen levels, driving hormone-sensitive breast tumors; and it functions as a solvent, increasing mucosal permeability to other carcinogens in tobacco smoke and diet.

The dose-response relationship for breast cancer begins at one drink per day. Women who consume one alcoholic drink daily increase their breast cancer risk by roughly 7 to 10% compared to non-drinkers. At 2 to 3 drinks daily, that risk increase reaches 20%. There is no threshold below which risk disappears.

A 2023 analysis published in The Lancet Oncology estimated that alcohol causes approximately 740,000 new cancer cases per year globally. In the United States, alcohol-attributable cancers account for roughly 5.4% of all new cancer diagnoses, or about 100,000 cases per year. Despite this, surveys show that fewer than half of Americans are aware that alcohol causes cancer. This ignorance is not accidental. The alcohol industry has funded research, lobbying, and public messaging designed to suppress this awareness.

When the NIAAA attempted in 2023 to update its guidelines to warn that alcohol causes cancer, industry lobbyists intervened with Congress to limit the warning’s scope. The playbook was identical to the tobacco industry’s 40-year campaign to obscure the lung cancer connection.

What it does to the brain

Alcohol is neurotoxic. This is not a contested claim. At autopsy, the brains of chronic heavy drinkers show measurable volume loss in the prefrontal cortex, the cerebellum, and the white matter tracts connecting them. Neuroimaging studies document brain atrophy after as few as 5 years of heavy drinking, and the atrophy correlates with doses that many Americans would describe as “social drinking.”

A 2017 study in the British Medical Journal, following 550 participants over 30 years, found that even moderate drinking, defined as 14 to 21 units per week (roughly 1 to 1.5 bottles of wine), associated with a 3-fold higher odds of right hippocampal atrophy compared to abstainers. The hippocampus governs memory formation. Three drinks a day, sustained over years, shrinks the structure responsible for remembering.

Alcohol’s psychiatric consequences include depression (alcohol is a CNS depressant; chronic consumption reliably induces depressive episodes), anxiety disorders through rebound hyperexcitability between drinking episodes, and psychosis at heavy doses. The relationship between alcohol and suicide is causal and dose-dependent: acute intoxication impairs impulse control; chronic use drives the depressive states that make suicide feel rational. Approximately 25 to 30% of suicides in the United States involve alcohol intoxication at the time of death.

Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome (WKS) results from thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency in chronic heavy drinkers. Wernicke’s encephalopathy presents acutely with confusion, ataxia, and eye movement abnormalities. Untreated, it progresses to Korsakoff psychosis, a permanent amnestic disorder in which the patient confabulates freely, fills memory gaps with fabrications, and has no insight into the deficit. Most physicians trained after 2000 have never seen a florid case because they’re not looking.

Weight gain and metabolic damage

Alcohol is calorie-dense at 7 calories per gram, placing it below fat (9 calories per gram) and well above carbohydrates or protein (4 calories per gram). A standard drink adds 100 to 150 calories of zero nutritional value. But the weight problem runs deeper than calorie arithmetic. When alcohol is present in the bloodstream, the liver treats it as a metabolic priority and halts fat oxidation entirely; dietary fat consumed alongside alcohol goes into storage rather than being burned.

Alcohol also disrupts leptin and ghrelin, the hormones that govern satiety and hunger, driving overeating during and after drinking episodes. The result is preferential deposition of visceral fat, the abdominal fat that wraps internal organs and drives insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and cardiovascular risk far more aggressively than subcutaneous fat does.

Heavy drinkers develop the characteristic centrally obese body composition for biological reasons, not because they eat poorly. Alcohol also degrades sleep architecture, suppressing the slow-wave and REM stages that regulate cortisol and growth hormone, and sleep disruption is itself an independent driver of weight gain and impaired glucose metabolism. The industry’s marketing of alcohol as a calorie-free indulgence, or at worst a minor dietary consideration, obscures a metabolic mechanism that helps explain why AUD and metabolic syndrome so often travel together.

The heart: revisiting the French paradox

The French paradox, the observation that French people consumed substantial saturated fat yet had relatively low rates of coronary artery disease, was attributed in the 1990s to red wine consumption and to resveratrol. That hypothesis launched a billion-dollar resveratrol supplement industry and a decade of headlines about wine’s heart-protective properties.

The paradox was an artifact of data collection methodology: France systematically undercoded cardiac deaths on death certificates for years. The resveratrol hypothesis collapsed when clinical trials found no benefit from resveratrol supplementation, and when researchers noted that the amounts of resveratrol in a glass of wine are pharmacologically trivial compared to the doses required to produce any measurable biological effect in animal models.

The cardiovascular effects of alcohol are mixed and dose-dependent in ways that the “a drink a day is good for your heart” narrative oversimplified. Light drinking produces a modest increase in high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol and reduces platelet aggregation, effects that sounded promising in epidemiological studies. But alcohol also raises blood pressure, increases triglycerides, induces cardiac arrhythmias (holiday heart syndrome, characterized by atrial fibrillation after binge drinking, is a recognized clinical entity), and causes alcoholic cardiomyopathy, a dilated cardiomyopathy that is the leading non-ischemic cause of heart failure in the developed world.

Liver disease: the visible iceberg tip

Alcohol-associated liver disease (ALD) is the most common cause of liver-related death in the Western world. It progresses through predictable stages: alcoholic fatty liver (steatosis), which is reversible with abstinence; alcoholic hepatitis, which has a 28-day mortality rate of 20 to 50% in severe cases; and alcoholic cirrhosis, which is irreversible, has a 5-year mortality of 50%, and requires transplantation in its end stage.

Women develop ALD at lower doses and after shorter durations of drinking than men, reflecting differences in body water content, ADH activity, and hormonal factors affecting gastric metabolism. A woman consuming 2 drinks per day over several years faces liver disease risk comparable to a man consuming 3 to 4 drinks per day.

Alcohol-associated hepatitis exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Hospitalizations for alcoholic hepatitis increased 30 to 50% at major centers between 2020 and 2022, driven by isolation, economic stress, and the removal of social constraints on drinking. The pandemic’s secondary damage toll included this surge, which received a fraction of the attention directed at the virus itself.

The industry: who profits and how they protect it

The global alcohol market is dominated by a small number of conglomerates. AB InBev, a Belgian-Brazilian company and the world’s largest brewer, controls roughly 25% of global beer volume. Diageo, headquartered in London, owns Johnnie Walker, Guinness, Smirnoff, and roughly 200 other brands. Pernod Ricard, a French company, controls Absolut, Jameson, and Chivas Regal among dozens more. These are not mom-and-pop operations. They are global multinationals with political access, legal teams larger than most law firms, and marketing budgets that dwarf the entire annual budget of the NIAAA.

The industry spends approximately $2 billion per year on alcohol advertising in the United States. That advertising is concentrated in sports broadcasts, where it reaches young male viewers, and in digital media, where algorithmic targeting allows messages to reach individuals identified as likely drinkers or people in early recovery. The industry has fought every proposed restriction on this advertising with the same “free speech” and “personal responsibility” framing the tobacco industry used for decades.

Industry funding of alcohol research follows the same pattern documented in Pharma. A 2017 analysis in PLOS Medicine found that industry-funded studies were 3.7 times more likely to report that moderate drinking had health benefits than studies without industry funding. The industry’s academic funding mechanism operates through entities such as the International Center for Alcohol Policies (ICAP) and its successor, the International Alliance for Responsible Drinking (IARD), which present themselves as public health organizations while advancing industry positions in World Health Organization (WHO) policy discussions.

The WHO has attempted to implement stricter global alcohol policies, including advertising restrictions, minimum unit pricing, and warning label requirements. At each attempt, industry representatives have lobbied national delegations to weaken or block proposals, using the same playbook the tobacco industry used to delay the global Framework Convention on Tobacco Control for years.

Treating AUD: what works, what gets prescribed

Three medications have a strong evidence base for AUD. Naltrexone, an opioid receptor antagonist, reduces the reward associated with drinking and decreases relapse rates by approximately 36% compared to placebo. Acamprosate reduces the NMDA-mediated hyperexcitability that drives craving during early abstinence. Disulfiram (Antabuse) creates an aversive reaction to alcohol by blocking ALDH, producing the acetaldehyde accumulation that causes flushing, nausea, and palpitations. All three are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Prescribing rates for these medications are dismal. Surveys of primary care physicians consistently find that fewer than 10% routinely prescribe naltrexone or acamprosate to patients with AUD. Among the reasons: inadequate training during residency, time pressures in clinic, continued reliance on referral to 12-step programs as the default treatment, and the absence of any Pharma marketing for these off-patent drugs with the enthusiasm applied to every new antidepressant or antipsychotic.

The Sinclair Method, a harm-reduction approach using naltrexone taken before drinking rather than as a continuous abstinence aid, achieves long-term remission rates of 78% in trials and has been standard of care in Finland for decades. In the United States, it is discussed mainly in patient advocacy circles and on Reddit threads. Most addiction specialists do not mention it unprompted.

Gabapentin, despite an FDA advisory in 2023 about misuse potential, has developed an evidence base for AUD treatment and reduces withdrawal severity. Topiramate, an anticonvulsant, reduces heavy drinking days in controlled trials. Neither is FDA-approved for AUD, leaving physicians who prescribe them facing off-label liability concerns while their patients drink themselves to death.

Roads, slopes, and living rooms: the daily toll

The official death count understates how thoroughly alcohol saturates American emergency medicine. In 2022, alcohol contributed to more than 4.2 million emergency department (ED) visits, according to NIAAA data. That accounts for 3.5% of all ED visits measured directly, but estimates that account for undercoding push the true share higher. Between January 2021 and September 2023, the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) identified roughly 8.6 million alcohol-related ED visits, more than twice the number linked to opioids or cannabis. Every hospital in the country runs a quiet parallel economy treating the injuries, arrhythmias, liver crises, and trauma that alcohol produces.

Roads

Alcohol accounts for 30% of all fatal traffic crashes in the United States. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recorded 12,429 deaths from alcohol-impaired driving in 2023 alone, one death every 42 minutes. That figure excludes crashes where drivers had sub-legal BAC levels of 0.01 to 0.07; adding those raises the 2023 toll to roughly 14,546. Among the drivers involved in fatal crashes who had detectable alcohol in their system, 67% had BAC levels of 0.15 or higher, nearly double the legal limit, meaning the problem is concentrated in severe intoxication, not borderline impairment.

The industry and its hospitality partners fought every policy that has moved those numbers. Ignition interlock requirements, mandatory sobriety checkpoints, higher alcohol taxes, and lower BAC thresholds all faced sustained industry lobbying. The progress made since the 1980s, largely through the advocacy of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and the lowering of the legal BAC threshold from 0.15 to 0.08, came despite the industry, not because of it.

Ski slopes

The ski resort model illustrates the vertically integrated economics of alcohol harm. Resorts sell alcohol aggressively, from mid-mountain bars open at 10 a.m. to slope-side lodges where apres-ski drinking begins before the lifts close. Injured guests then flow to on-mountain medical clinics, which function as separate profit centers, charging emergency room rates for fracture stabilization, spinal precautions, and helicopter evacuations that the same guests’ insurance companies pay without question.

The research on alcohol and ski injury is consistent, if incomplete because resorts have no incentive to collect it systematically. A study of 4,550 injured skiers in the Italian Dolomites found high blood alcohol concentration in 43% of the 200 major-trauma patients tested, and researchers noted that unsystematic alcohol testing meant the true figure was an undercount. A UK study found that skiers are 43% more likely to be involved in a crash after drinking, with 3.8 million British skiers reporting alcohol-related slope injuries over a 5-year period. Austrian survey data showed that 30% of male recreational skiers consumed alcohol on the day of skiing, while more than half drank heavily the night before. Alcohol amplifies at altitude: lower oxygen tension accelerates intoxication, meaning a skier at 10,000 feet is impaired on fewer drinks than the same person at sea level.

The conflict of interest is structural. The resort sells the substance that causes the injury, staffs the clinic that treats it, and bills the insurer that pays for both. No regulator requires disclosure of this arrangement, and no liability attaches to the bar that served the skier who then fractured a stranger’s femur on the intermediate run below.

Living rooms

Alcohol is the leading chemical contributor to domestic violence in the United States. The National Institute of Justice estimates that alcohol is involved in 55% of domestic violence incidents. The mechanism is biological: acute ethanol intoxication disables the prefrontal cortex’s inhibitory control over the amygdala, the structure that processes threat and drives aggression. Chronic heavy drinking compounds this through sustained neurological remodeling that makes emotional regulation permanently less reliable.

Children in households with an alcoholic parent have a 4-fold increased risk of developing AUD themselves. The transmission runs through genetics and through trauma: children raised around violence learn that alcohol and danger are inseparable companions, and they often reproduce that pairing in adulthood. Roughly 40% of violent crimes in the United States involve an intoxicated offender, and the criminal justice system warehouses the alcohol industry’s externalized damage at public expense.

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs) affect an estimated 1 to 5% of Americans, making them more common than autism spectrum disorder. They range from fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), characterized by facial dysmorphia, growth restriction, and intellectual disability, to milder neurodevelopmental effects on attention and executive function. No safe level of prenatal alcohol exposure exists; the same “safe at low doses” myth that circulates among adults circulates among pregnant women, with consequences that last a lifetime.

None of this appears on the industry’s balance sheet. The $2 billion in annual US advertising that normalizes drinking as pleasure, sports, and social connection does not include a line item for the fractured orbital bones, the children’s protective services cases, or the ski patrol helicopters. Those costs transfer cleanly to families, insurers, taxpayers, and emergency physicians who treat, night after night, the consequences of a substance the culture still officially classifies as a beverage.

Globalist fingerprints

The hypothesis that alcohol normalization is a deliberate tool of social control is not new. Aldous Huxley wrote about it in 1932 in Brave New World, where soma, the state-sanctioned euphoric drug, kept the population docile. The mechanism does not require conspiracy in the traditional sense; it requires only that moneyed interests recognize that a sedated, addicted, cognitively impaired population is easier to govern and more profitable to sell to than a clear-headed one.

The evidence of coordination is structural. The alcohol industry participates in WHO policy discussions through industry-funded “health” organizations in ways that would be recognized as a conflict of interest if practiced by any other sector. It funds academic research that produces favorable findings. It markets aggressively to populations whose drinking is already problematic, above all, young adults and minority communities. It lobbies against every evidence-based policy intervention, from minimum unit pricing to advertising restrictions to warning labels.

The same Rockefeller-adjacent network that built Pharma and the food processing industries in the 20th century had substantial interests in the alcohol industry’s political normalization. John D. Rockefeller Jr., ironically a lifelong teetotaler, contributed heavily to Anti-Saloon League efforts during Prohibition, but his family’s broader industrial interests included the chemical and pharmaceutical companies that supplied the alcohol industry and later profited from treating its bad outcomes.

The alcohol industry’s marketing budget flows heavily into professional sports, a sector that also receives substantial government subsidies through stadium construction and tax arrangements. The interlock between sports broadcasting, alcohol advertising, and political access creates an ecosystem where challenging alcohol’s cultural status becomes career-limiting for any politician, regulator, or public health official who tries it.

Consider what a blunted population looks like from the perspective of those managing it: less likely to organize, more susceptible to simple emotional appeals, more prone to family disintegration that increases dependence on state services, more easily monetized through healthcare for the disorders that alcohol causes. The industry does not need to be malevolent in its intent; it needs only to be indifferent to consequences while maximizing shareholder returns. The effect is the same.

What other countries show us

Scotland introduced minimum unit pricing (MUP) for alcohol in 2018, setting a floor of 50 pence per unit of alcohol. A 5-year evaluation published in The Lancet in 2023 found that alcohol-specific deaths fell by 13.4% in Scotland compared to what would have been expected without MUP, and that hospital admissions for ALD fell significantly. The effect was concentrated among the heaviest drinkers, the population that most needed intervention and that educational approaches alone fail to reach.

Canada followed with its own minimum pricing policies in several provinces, with similar results. England and Wales declined to implement MUP for over a decade despite Scottish evidence, reflecting the political weight of the alcohol and hospitality industries in Westminster lobbying.

Nordic countries with state alcohol monopolies (Finland’s Alko, Sweden’s Systembolaget, Norway’s Vinmonopolet) show substantially lower rates of AUD and alcohol-related mortality than comparable European countries with liberalized markets, even controlling for cultural factors. The mechanism is straightforward: restricting availability and maintaining price floors reduces consumption across the population, with the largest effects in the most vulnerable drinkers.

Russia’s alcohol mortality crisis of the 1990s, in which male life expectancy fell by 7 years following the market liberalization and privatization that made alcohol cheap and ubiquitous, is the sharpest natural experiment in recent history. When Vladimir Putin’s government imposed steep alcohol taxes and restricted sales hours beginning around 2006, male life expectancy began recovering. The lesson, that price and availability drive population-level alcohol harm, is unambiguous and universally ignored by industry-aligned policymakers.

The human capacity to survive what we do to ourselves

Humans are, the clinical record makes clear, nearly indestructible in ways that should not work. Patients with liver cirrhosis who achieve abstinence show extensive hepatic regeneration. Brain atrophy from chronic alcohol use reverses with sustained sobriety, with white matter recovery detectable on MRI within months. The hippocampus, that structure so vulnerable to moderate chronic drinking, demonstrates neurogenesis in abstinence.

The same capacity for biological repair is visible across every domain of iatrogenic and environmental assault I have examined: bodies recovering from decades of unnecessary medications, immune systems reconstituting after chemotherapy, microbiomes rebuilding after years of antibiotics. The body wants to live. It needs us to stop poisoning it.

This resilience is not permission to continue drinking. It is an argument for stopping, because the capacity for repair is documented and waiting. The people who quit drinking at 45 do not recover as fully as those who quit at 30, and those who quit at 30 do not recover as fully as those who never started. But most people who quit find the recovery extraordinary, and most who are told it is too late to matter are wrong.

Synthesis

Alcohol is the oldest and most successfully normalized poison in human history. Its cultural integration is so complete that questioning it feels, to many people, like questioning something as fundamental as food. That feeling is the product of centuries of deliberate cultivation by commercial interests that understood, long before modern neuroscience confirmed it, that a substance capable of producing physical dependence in 10% of users and psychological habituation in many more was an extraordinary business opportunity.

The “safe at moderate doses” doctrine was never as well-supported as its promoters claimed, and the research demolishing it has been available for long enough that its continued circulation in medical education and popular media cannot be attributed to innocent lag. Something maintains it. The same economic and political forces that maintained the tobacco-heart disease disconnect for decades, that maintained the opioid-for-chronic-pain narrative until the overdose deaths became impossible to ignore, have an interest in maintaining the fiction that 1 to 2 drinks per day is a health-neutral choice.

The parallels to other Pharma and healthcare frauds are not coincidental. The pattern of industry funding skewing research, regulatory capture limiting effective policy, clinician education lagging behind evidence, and stigma-based treatment barriers keeping effective pharmacology from reaching patients appears in alcohol’s story as it appears in opioids, antidepressants, or statins. The institutions built to protect public health have been the vehicles of its subversion.

The roads, the slopes, and the living rooms are where the accounting happens. 12,429 dead on US highways in 2023 from drunk driving alone. An estimated 43% of major trauma patients tested at ski resorts showing detectable blood alcohol. More than half of all domestic violence incidents preceded by drinking. These are not statistics about a legal recreational substance operating within normal risk tolerances. They are the footprint of a product that externalizes its true cost onto the bodies of people who never asked to absorb it.

What comes after recognizing this? At the individual level, the practical answer is simple: less alcohol, or none, produces better health outcomes at every dose, and the pharmacological tools to support people who struggle with cessation exist and are underused. At the population level, minimum unit pricing, restricted advertising, mandatory health labeling, and treatment parity for AUD with other chronic diseases would save hundreds of thousands of lives per year in the United States alone.

Whether those measures arrive depends on whether the people who understand the evidence become louder than the people who profit from confusion. The track record is not encouraging. But the track record on tobacco eventually changed, and lung cancer rates fell. The tools are known. The will is the variable.

Editing credit: Jim Arnold of Liar’s World Substack.