Month: March 2024

Authored by Mark Tapscott via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Officials from the National Science Foundation tried to conceal the spending of millions of taxpayer dollars on research and development for artificial intelligence tools used to censor political speech and influence the outcome of elections, according to a new congressional report.

The report looking into the National Science Foundation (NSF) is the latest addition to a growing body of evidence that critics claim shows federal officials—especially at the FBI and the CIA—are creating a “censorship-industrial complex” to monitor American public expression and suppress speech disfavored by the government.

“In the name of combatting alleged misinformation regarding COVID-19 and the 2020 election, NSF has been issuing multimillion-dollar grants to university and nonprofit research teams,” states the report by the House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

“The purpose of these taxpayer-funded projects is to develop AI-powered censorship and propaganda tools that can be used by governments and Big Tech to shape public opinion by restricting certain viewpoints or promoting others.”

The report also described, based on previously unknown documents, elaborate efforts by NSF officials to cover up the true purposes of the research.

The efforts included tracking public criticism of the foundation’s work by conservative journalists and legal scholars.

The NSF also developed a media strategy “that considered blacklisting certain American media outlets because they were scrutinizing NSF’s funding of censorship and propaganda tools,” the report said.

NSF Responds

In a statement to The Epoch Times, an NSF spokesman categorically rejected the report’s allegations.

“NSF does not engage in censorship and has no role in content policies or regulations. Per statute and guidance from Congress, we have made investments in research to help understand communications technologies that allow for things like deep fakes and how people interact with them,” the spokesman said.

“We know our adversaries are already using these technologies against us in multiple ways. We know that scammers are using these techniques on unsuspecting victims. It is in this nation’s national and economic security interest to understand how these tools are being used and how people are responding so we can provide options for ways we can improve safety for all.”

The spokesman also denied that NSF ever sought to conceal its investments in the so-called Track F program, and that the foundation does not follow the policy regarding media that was outlined in the documents discovered by the committee.

Track F Program Funding

The $39 million Track F Program is the heart of the congressional report’s analysis of a systematic federal effort to replace human “disinformation” monitors with AI-driven digital systems that are capable of vastly more comprehensive monitoring and censoring.

“The NSF-funded projects threaten to help create a censorship regime that could significantly impede the fundamental First Amendment rights of millions of Americans, and potentially do so in a manner that is instantaneous and largely invisible to its victims,” the congressional report warned.

During NSF’s solicitation and sifting of dozens of bids it received in response to its request for proposals, a University of Michigan team, with its “WiseDex” tool, pitched federal officials on enabling the government “to externalize the difficult responsibility of censorship.”

The Michigan team was one of four Track F funding recipients spotlighted by the congressional report. A total of 12 recipients were involved in Track F funding and activities.

The second of the four spotlighted teams is from Meedan, a San Francisco-based group that describes itself as “a global technology not-for-profit that builds software and programmatic initiatives to strengthen journalism, digital literacy, and accessibility of information online and off. We develop open-source tools for creating and sharing context on digital media through annotation, verification, archival, and translation.”

In fact, according to the congressional report, Meedan’s Co-Insights Program uses AI to identify and counter “misinformation” on a massive scale.

In one illustration that the group provided to NSF in its funding pitch, was to “crawl” more than 750,000 blogs and media articles on a daily basis for misinformation and fact-checking on themes such as “undermining trust in mainstream media,” “fear-mongering and anti-Black narratives,” and “weakening political participation.”

The Co-Insights Program, according to the congressional report, was “part of a much larger, long-term goal by the nonprofit. As [Scott] Hale, the director of research at Meedan, explained in an email to NSF, in his ‘dream world,’ Big Tech would collect all of the censored content to enable ‘disinformation’ researchers to use that data to create ‘automated detection’ to censor any similar speech automatically.”

The third spotlighted team is from the University of Wisconsin and its CourseCorrect tool that received $5.75 million in NSF funding “to develop a tool to ‘empower efforts by journalists, developers, and citizens to fact-check delegitimizing information’ about ‘election integrity and vaccine efficacy’ on social media.”

The tool “would allow ‘fact-checkers to perform rapid-cycle testing of fact-checking messages and monitor their real-time performance among online communities at-risk of misinformation exposure,’” the congressional report said.

‘Effective Interventions’ to Educate Americans

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) team that developed its “Search Lit” tool with government funding was the fourth of the highlighted NSF grant recipients.

Officials with NSF asked the MIT team “to develop ‘effective interventions’ to educate Americans—specifically, those that the MIT researchers alleged ’may be more vulnerable to misinformation campaigns’—on how to discern fact from fiction online.

“In particular, the MIT team believed that conservatives, minorities, and veterans were uniquely incapable of assessing the veracity of content online,” the congressional report noted.

“In order to build a ’more digitally discerning public,’ the Search Lit team proposed developing tools that could support the government’s viewpoint on COVID-19 public health measures and the 2020 election.”

In a study by one of the MIT team’s members, people who hold as sacred certain texts and documents, most notably the Bible and the U.S. Constitution, were described as “‘often focused on reading a wide array of primary sources, and performing their own synthesis,’ further alleging that, ‘unlike expert lateral readers,’ the conservative respondents made ‘no such effort’ to “eliminate bias that might skew results from search terms.”

Read more here…

The chainsaw-wielding Argentine president Javier Milei has consolidated eighteen government ministries into nine, fired 5,000 government workers, devalued the peso near market rates, and introduced economic reforms to overhaul the faltering economy after a series of devastating financial crises. 

The latest fat Milei has trimmed from the bloated government’s books is the largest and most prestigious news agency in Argentina, Telam. The state-run media outlet has served as a mouthpiece of “propaganda” for previous progressive administrations. 

On Monday morning, Telam’s website was shut down. The current message on the media outlet’s website reads: “Page under reconstruction. The page you are trying to view is under reconstruction.” 

The eight-decade news organization, with over 800 staff, is the latest casualty of Milei’s drive to shake up the prior corrupt progressive government. He told lawmakers last Friday about his plans to shutter the media outlet as part of a wave of reforms targeting public bodies that he warns are “covert propaganda ministry.” 

“We will close the news agency Télam, which has been used as a Kirchnerist propaganda agency for the last decades,” Milei told lawmakers, referring to former president Cristina Kirchner. 

And, of course, US legacy media outlets were unhappy about Milei’s move. 

Reuters cited the Buenos Aires Press Union, which wrote on X: 

“It is a blow against democracy and freedom of expression, and that is why we are going to defend it.”

The libertarian and self-described “anarcho-capitalist” understands the government shouldn’t have a monopoly on the so-called ‘free press’. The president is also ridding the government of dangerous ‘collectivist experiments‘ such as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. 

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

“We can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.”

So shrugged the ancient historian Livy (59 B.C.- A.D. 17) of the long decline of Roman national character that, in his age, finally ended the Roman Republic.

Like a patient whose medicine proves worse than the disease, Livy lamented that the Romans knew that they had become corrupt and lawless.

But the very contemplation of the hard medicine needed for restoration – and the furious reaction that would meet the remedy – made it impossible to save the patient.

America is nearing such an impasse.

We know that no state can long exist after opening its borders to over 7 million illegal aliens, requiring neither background checks nor legality.

The recent murder of a Georgia female jogger by an illegal alien and the savage beating of New York policemen by similar others hardly merit media attention.

Everyone knows that neither new appropriations nor new laws are needed to secure the border as it was in 2020.

Instead, we could just stop suicidal catch-and-release, deport lawbreakers, privilege the legal over the illegal immigrant, demand would-be refugees apply for asylum first in their native countries, finish the border wall, and pressure Mexico to stop undermining the territorial integrity of its northern neighbor.

But then we shrug, “We can’t do that”—paralyzed in fear of being smeared as “xenophobic,” “nativist,” or “racist.”

So this generation apparently feels that it can endure the collateral damage of daily assaults on American citizens, the near bankruptcy of our cities, and 100,000 fentanyl deaths per year—but certainly not the idea that it is somehow not politically correct or compassionate.

The same is true of the $35 trillion debt, now costing more than $1 trillion a year in interest payments—and growing. We all know it is unsustainable. Americans understand it will eventually lead either to destructive hyperinflation, suicidal renunciation of federal debt, or confiscation of private savings.

Yet we ignore the reckless spending and keep borrowing well over $1 trillion a year.

Apparently, our generation prefers being praised as “virtuous” and “caring.” So it leaves the next generation to be smeared as “cruel” and “unfair” when it is forced to cut federal entitlements and bloated government or face civilizational collapse.

The crime epidemic is also similar. Everyone accepts that no society can long endure quasi-legalized shoplifting or green-lighting smash-and-grabbers and carjackers to be released without bail.

But we assume that such a civilizational implosion will never reach our own sanctuary neighborhoods or safe places of work—at least not yet.

We also know that restoring deterrence by arresting, convicting, and jailing repeat felons will return safety to our streets.

But again, we fear even more that advocating “law and order” will earn slanders like “racist” or “reactionary.”

Ditto the homeless. In an age of self-congratulation and hyper-environmentalism, we know that a million homeless defecating, urinating, injecting, and assaulting on our downtown sidewalks and storefronts is medieval.

We know that it is illegal to camp out on the street and publicly harass citizens or relieve oneself in public.

And we know the cure lies in building and staffing more mental institutions and providing areas far from public spaces where the homeless can find shelter, sanitation, and medical care.

But the very idea of removing anyone from his accustomed sidewalk spot, or the notion of the use of force to transport the mentally ill to proper and humane facilities, terrifies us.

So we walk around, step over, and ignore those on the street.

Is the assumption that the odds of being assaulted or sickened acceptable? Or do we just not wish to learn where the flotsam, jetsam, and human offal of the street end up?

Most accept that had Donald Trump just not run for president in 2024 or was a man of the left, he would not now be facing four different felony court cases.

Most accept that three of the four prosecutors have either in advance promised to get Trump or have proved grossly unethical.

Most know it is wrong to try to remove a leading presidential candidate from state ballots.

Yet many shrug that this new weaponization of America’s legal system is the flamboyant Trump’s own problem, not their own.

So they ignore the third worldization of our political system, which they quietly acknowledge is otherwise leading us to a Venezuela-like mess.

The paralysis of American society extends to our foreign policy as well. We deplore the terrorism of Iran and its thuggish surrogates. But we fear more the nasty, costly business of stopping its aggression.

Societies do not always collapse from a lack of wealth, invasion, or natural catastrophes.

Most often, they know what is destroying them. But they are so paralyzed by their fear that the road to salvation becomes too painful to even contemplate.

So they implode gradually, then suddenly.

We’ve been stating for months that both the DEI and ESG gravy trains on Wall Street are finally coming to an unceremonious end. Who would have guessed the profit motive would be incompatible with mindless, unproductive virtue signaling and reverse racism? 

The pushback on DEI has been immense, with entire universities and corporations slashing their DEI departments. Subha Barry, former head of diversity at Merrill Lynch, told Bloomberg this weekend: “We’re past the peak.”

The report highlighted yet another shift on Wall Street, wherein programs open to people of color and women are “now open to all”. Imagine that…

For example, Goldman Sachs has adjusted its “Possibilities Summit,” previously exclusive to Black college students, to now welcome White students as well. Bank of America Corp. has expanded its internal programs, initially aimed at women and minorities, to include all employees. Furthermore, Bank of New York Mellon Corp. has been advised by legal counsel to reevaluate and potentially eliminate strict diversity metrics from its workforce evaluations, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

Executives at major banks, including Goldman Sachs, publicly affirm their commitment to diversity, despite acknowledging privately the challenges posed by a growing campaign against DEI initiatives led by figures like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, the report says.

Efforts to recruit diverse talent through programs for women and minorities are being reassessed, along with other diversity measures within corporations. Bloomberg says the shift is notable compared to the ambitious diversity pledges made by CEOs following George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Almost as if it was just mindless lip service to silence the ‘woke mob’…

The recent Supreme Court decision against affirmative action in colleges has intensified legal challenges to corporate diversity efforts, with banks wary of becoming lawsuit targets over claims of reverse discrimination, the report says. 

“The legal assault on corporate diversity initiatives is gathering steam” after the Supreme Court’s rejection of affirmative action at colleges, the report says.  

While black people make up about 14% of the total population, their representation in the senior roles at banks like Citi, JP Morgan and Goldman remains 8.7%, 5% and 3.7%, respectively, the note says. However, these figures have grown significantly since 2019:

Several other financial institutions, including the Bank of New York and Bank of America are subtly altering their approaches to diversity and inclusion initiatives.

These changes range from modifying executive compensation linked to diversity progress, adjusting the language around D&I goals, reconsidering certain mentorship programs, and adapting recruitment strategies to avoid explicit references to race and gender.

Despite these adjustments, spokespeople for these banks assert their continued commitment to fostering an inclusive workplace. And, nonetheless, industry consultants (whose meaningless careers and paychecks rely solely on racial division and DEI initiatives to begin with) and some financial executives still emphasize the importance of persevering with D&I efforts, despite these internal and external pressures.

Industry consultant Duarte McCarthy told Bloomberg: “We’re not suggesting that things stop because there’s this fear factor. But rather, take a look.”

Ana Duarte McCarthy, former chief diversity officer at Citigroup concluded: “We’re at an interesting inflection point.” 

Yeah, the kind of inflection point that is going to see a lot of former “Chief Diversity Officers” scrambling through LinkedIn and updating their resumes…

By John Kingston of FreightWaves

With a Norfolk Southern derailment in Pennsylvania on Saturday that sent diesel fuel into a Lehigh Valley River, the already heated battle over control of the railroad with safety issues as a backdrop got even hotter. 

The derailment came after two days of charges, countercharges and missives flying back and forth over the safety records of both Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific, with leading government officials that regulate the rails leveling separate heavy criticism at the two companies. 

And while it hasn’t yet provoked any government response, the issue of safety and levels of employment could also be triggered by Friday’s news that BNSF had implemented a significant number of furloughs. 

In the proxy battle roiling Norfolk Southern, the activist investor group Ancora is recommending the replacement of eight new directors to the Norfolk Southern board. It also wants to replace CEO Alan Shaw with former UPS executive Jim Barber and name Jamie Boychuk, a former executive at CSX, to replace current COO Paul Duncan.

That fight now has the Pennsylvania derailment as part of the battle, and Ancora wasted no time Saturday coming out with a statement over the incident.

“Our proposed slate and management team are unanimous in their view that Norfolk Southern must become a safer and more reliable railroad before it can ever reach its full potential,” Ancora said in the statement. “Following this latest derailment, we call for the immediate termination of CEO Alan Shaw and stand ready to engage with the Company about an orderly reconstitution of the Board and a transition to capable management with a track record of actually delivering on safety commitments.”

The statement went on to say that “an incident like this, which is drawing national news coverage and resulting in more embarrassment for the railroad, should put an end to the Board’s unsustainable efforts to save a tainted CEO with no long-term future.3 How can anyone defend this?”

What happened?

According to news reports, the derailment took place in Lower Saucon Township, which is near the Allentown-Bethlehem area. There were no reports of injuries, although diesel fuel being carried in a tank car did spill, there were no reports of contamination or evacuations. Plastic pellets also spilled, according to the news reports. 

In a statement provided to FreightWaves on Sunday, a spokesperson said: “Norfolk Southern crews and contractors remain at the derailment site. Members of the NTSB have arrived and are investigating. Once they have completed their investigation of the scene, we will continue with site cleanup and begin work to restore the track. The area where the locomotives were in the water will remain contained with booms until any residual sheen has been removed.”

Saturday’s derailment comes after two days of back-and-forth over two of the U.S.-based Class 1 railroads that left heads spinning. The scorecard for the criticism and the responses went like this:

— Martin Oberman, chairman of the Surface Transportation Board, ripped into Ancora Associates for its proxy battle over Norfolk Southern (NYSE: NSC) railroad. Oberman spoke to the Southeast Association of Rail Shippers 2024 Spring Meeting in Atlanta on Thursday, where he said Ancora “has nothing to say about what it could do better” than current management in running Norfolk Southern, adding, “I think we can assume that if Ancora succeeds in its bid to control NS, its next move will be to put the Brooklyn Bridge on the market.”

Ancora didn’t have any public response to Oberman’s comments, but on Friday, it sent a letter to the Norfolk Southern board, just a few days after the railroad released its 2024 proxy statement. The proxy revealed that in 2023 — the year when Norfolk Southern labored under the fallout from the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio — NS CEO Alan Shaw had total compensation of $13.41 million, compared to $9.78 million a year before.

— The second blast from a government official aimed at a railroad came from Amit Bose, the administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration. In a letter addressed to UP CEO Jim Vena,

Bose criticized recent furloughs implemented at Union Pacific (NYSE: UNP). “It is imperative that UP prioritizes safety above all else and takes immediate steps to address this issue, an issue disproportionately affecting UP workers since your railroad continues to furlough employees at a rate, based on available data, far outpacing that of any of your Class I peers.” Bose wrote.

— Union Pacific quickly responded to Bose’s comments with a letter from Vena, which said the FRA head was portraying an “inaccurate correlation between natural workforce fluctuations and safety.”

Oberman was harsh in his assessment of Ancora’s motives. “Several weeks ago, Ancora wrote me a letter,” Oberman said, according to a transcript released by the STB. “The essence of their message was that they had taken a $1 billion dollar stake in NS in order for it — quote — ‘to become a safer railroad.’ Really? What hedge fund raises $1 billion to promote safety anywhere?”

Oberman, as he has done before, criticized railroad focus on its operating ratio (OR), with the STB head expressing concern that a goal to reduce OR can come at the expense of both safety and performance. 

“Ancora principally and repeatedly focuses on a rapid lowering of the OR to drive cash payouts and raise its stock price, harshly criticizing present NS management for not making a lower OR the objective,” Oberman said. “We now know that this is wrong-headed thinking. Making OR the corporate objective is what led to elimination of thousands of workers which caused the service crisis.” 

The reference to the service crisis was from earlier in his speech when he recapped STB actions to force service improvements during the enormous system backups of 2022. 

Ancora’s Friday letter was addressed to Amy Miles, the non-executive chair of the NS board.  The letter said that Ancora — which as an activist investor has previously trained its sights on Forward Air (NASDAQ: FWRD) and C.H. Robinson (NASDAQ: CHRW) — said Shaw has “presided over industry-worst operating results, sustained share price underperformance and an ineffective and tone-deaf response to the preventable derailment in East Palestine.” It said Anchor had “offered viable solutions in the form of exceptional people with a strategic vision.”

Norfolk Southern’s stock price in the last 52 weeks is up about 14%. During that time, its fierce rival for business east of the Mississippi, CSX (NASDAQ: CSX), is up about 23.7% while Union Pacific is up 21.5%.

Focusing in on Shaw’s pay package from 2023

On the issue of Shaw’s pay, the Ancora letter said shareholders were “baffled” at the decision to give the CEO a raise in the same year as the East Palestine derailment and the fallout from it. 

“We challenge the Board’s determination that it had to adjust executive compensation in 2023 to

‘retain key talent,’” Ancora said, quoting a board statement. “We do not see how the Board could have actually viewed Mr. Shaw as a flight risk. In addition to being a more than 30-year insider at Norfolk Southern, he was a relatively new, unproven CEO off to an extremely rocky start. The fact that this decision was made suggests deference to management and a lack of respect for shareholders and stakeholders.”

UP furloughs at issue

In the back-and-forth surrounding Union Pacific, Bose said UP’s decision to furlough some worker is a sign that the railroad “has again chosen to prioritize cost-cutting measures over ensuring safe operations, jeopardizing the well-being of both UP’s workers and the public.”

“Furloughing maintenance of equipment workers puts a strain on workers across the railroad, leading to fatigue and potential errors that could have severe ramifications for both workers and the public,” Bose wrote. 

In a letter signed by Vena, UP responded to Bose’s criticism with several key rebuttals.

— It cited several statistical points about derailments, that “serious” derailments were down 26% in 2023 from 2019 levels, track-related derailments had declined 28% in the past 10 years, and that UP had recorded an 8.7% improvement in mainline derailments in 2023 versus 2021.

The Vena letter said “fluctuations in workforce needs are a natural component of operating the railroad … normal, cyclical and vary from year to year based on business needs, capital projects and weather.”

To support its criticism that Bose was not making distinctions among types of workers and railroad needs, Vena’s response said the Bose letter “combines different types of workers (Mechanical employees and Engineering employees) and work done on the railroad (equipment maintenance and capital projects), and therefore paints an incorrect and incomplete picture of the natural role workforce fluctuations play in operating a railroad year-round.”

“We’ve already begun seeing an increase in demand and have more employees working in January and February of this year,” Vena wrote.

The letter also said workers impacted by furloughs and layoffs can apply for other positions at Union Pacific. 

It’s been a long time coming, but the bulls are finally back in uranium. And with them comes the restart of multiple uranium projects that have been taken offline in the years while the commodity slouched in price. 

We have long stated here on Zero Hedge that nuclear power is an obvious win/win: it’s clean, it’s safe, it provides robust power and, most importantly to our liberal friends, it has minimal emissions. So why isn’t it more prominent?

In the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, uranium mining in the United States, particularly in Wyoming, Texas, Arizona, and Utah, experienced a significant downturn.

This decline wasn’t helped by uranium prices plummeting and nations such as Germany and Japan moving away from nuclear energy. However, as global efforts to reduce emissions renew interest in nuclear power, and as leading uranium producers face challenges in meeting demand, prices for the metal have risen sharply, a new Bloomberg report says.

This resurgence in prices is offering previously unprofitable American uranium mines an opportunity to re-enter the market and address the supply shortfall.

According to the report, as the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada’s annual meeting takes place in Toronto, attracting thousands from the mining industry, uranium will be a key focus.

With participants including major uranium firms like Denison Mines Corp., Fission Uranium Corp., and IsoEnergy Ltd., the event highlights the growing importance of uranium in the context of climate change and nuclear power.

The International Atomic Energy Agency predicts a significant rise in uranium demand, foreseeing a need for over 100,000 metric tons annually by 2040, necessitating a near doubling of current mining and processing efforts.

Scott Melbye, executive vice president of Texas-based Uranium Energy Corp. said: “We’re in an old-fashioned, plain-and-simple supply squeeze. Demand is increasing again, with new reactors coming online.”

John Ciampagli, Chief Executive Officer of Sprott Asset Management added: “The industry is clearly trying to respond with smaller mines reopening, but when you have a mine that hasn’t operated for that long, it’s obviously not very substantive.”

Cameco has resumed operations at MacArthur River and Key Lake, the world’s largest high-grade uranium mine and mill in Saskatchewan, Canada, after halting from 2018 to 2021 due to poor market conditions. 

The reopening of U.S. mines signifies a comeback for an industry that nearly vanished five years ago, with production plummeting to 174,000 pounds in 2019 from a peak of 44 million pounds in 1980. This decline was accompanied by increased reliance on uranium imports from nations such as Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan, and Russia.

Amid geopolitical tensions, particularly sanctions on Russia after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine affecting uranium shipments from Kazakhstan, the U.S. is motivated by both supply security and political reasons to boost its uranium production. The Uranium Producers of America suggests the U.S. will need to open 8 to 10 major new mines within the next decade to meet demand.

Original by Drew Allen:

During the debut of his new Saturday show on the General Michael Flynn-backed Patriot TV, Drew Allen – host of the Drew Allen Show – opened by claiming the Democrats stole the 2020 election.

“They cheated!” Allen says plainly.

Allen, of course, isn’t the first to say it. While the claim isn’t novel, his explanation is—and brilliant too. 

Allen says:

“I want you to listen very carefully. This is very, very important. In fact, it’s the key to understanding the world that we’re living in right now in the United States of America. Nothing that is happening can make sense to you unless you understand one thing. And this is something that you are forbidden from believing. Alright, this is the key to everything. Are you ready? The Democrats stole the 2020 election. They cheated! Alright, if you believe that, you can understand what’s going on. You have a lens to comprehend the world that we’re living in—the insanity. But if you don’t believe it, nothing makes sense.”

Allen explains that when the Democrats started prosecuting Trump, “what they thought was gonna happen is that the American people were going to abandon Trump.”

He points out that “…it didn’t. It had the opposite impact. It backfired on them. What actually happened was Donald Trump’s poll numbers improved. Improved! So they didn’t know what to do. They had to double down on that strategy.”

“They want a Richard Nixon situation,” Allen points out “and it didn’t happen. They cannot fathom that Trump is still standing.”

Allen plays a clip of Democrat lawyer Marc Elias to prove his point.

In the clip Elias says:

“how they decided that the candidate who is going to be best as their standard bearer is Donald Trump, is not just sickening from a standpoint of American politics, but is actually baffling from a matter of partisan strategy. I mean, it is hard to imagine a worse candidate for them to put forward, a candidate with more vulnerabilities than Donald Trump. The fact that the Republican Party itself is unwilling to just say he is out of bounds, he is too toxic, and he will not be out standard bearer…”

Allen points out:

“You hear what he’s saying there right? He wants to choose our candidate…in his opinion he cannot comprehend how the American people, the Republican voter has not ditched Trump. They do not want to face Trump in 2024 because why? Because they stole 2020 and they’re worried about 2024 again.”

Allen goes on to explain how the latest Democrat Party meltdown over the Supreme Court taking up the Trump immunity appeal proves his point beyond doubt. 

“The Hill, Fortune Magazine, Axios, NBC, they all had these polls that got them giddy with excitement…for example an NBC news poll recently it showed that former President Donald Trump uh leading current President Joe Biden by 5 points among registered voters, well, when the surveys final question re-asks voters what their ballot choice would be if Trump is found guilty and convicted of a felony this year Biden narrowly pulls ahead of Trump.”

“So they were banking on what?” Patriot TV host Allen asks.

“Getting a conviction of Trump because they believe, because their pollsters told them that one of their paths to victory was dependent, perhaps their only path to victory apart from cheating…their success in 2024 was heavily dependent upon getting a conviction.

And so with the Supreme Court coming in and basically ensuring that no conviction was going to happen before November they’re losing their minds because why? They stole 2020 and they don’t believe they can beat Trump in 2024. See it’s making so much sense now right?”

The Drew Allen Show is the most exciting new addition to Patriot TV and a new episode will air each Saturday. Allen is also the author of America’s Last Stand: Will You Vote to Save or Destroy America in 2024?, a new book lauded as a sequel to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.

Watch the episode here.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officers (CBP) at the San Ysidro Port of Entry made a massive bust over the weekend, discovering more than $11 million of blue fentanyl pills concealed in a car on Sunday. 

At the San Ysidro POE around 8PM on Sunday night, a K-9 unit encountered a “37-year-old man driving a 2008 sedan applying for admission into the United States from Mexico,” a release from Customs and Border Patrol revealed over the weekend. 

The K-9 unit alerted for drugs near the glove compartment and the vehicle was referred for further inspection, at which point “CBP officers extracted a total of 100 packages containing blue pills concealed within the vehicle’s dashboard and within the front passenger seats”.

The release noted that the pills were tested and found to be fentanyl. Investigators ultimately uncovered approximately 561,000 tablets, weighing in at 123.6 pounds, with an estimated street value of around $11.22 million.

Mariza Marin, Port Director for the San Ysidro Port of Entry, commented: “Fentanyl is a very lethal drug that continues to be encountered along our southern border. I’m very proud of the exceptional work by our officers who skillfully interdict illicit narcotics on a daily basis.”

The individual was placed under the supervision of Homeland Security Investigations for additional scrutiny. CBP officers confiscated both the drugs and the vehicle involved.

This confiscation is a component of Operation Apollo, a collaborative regional initiative that unites federal, state, and local agencies in the fight against the menace posed by fentanyl and other illegal synthetic drugs.

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

Courtesy of Establishment Shills, Central Banksters… and goldbugs

It’s that time again, when Bitcoin is about to embark on a string of fresh all-time highs, triggering the mainstream pundit class into public displays of denial and angst.

Just in case you may think “It’s a bubble” and “Tulips, backed by nothing” is a next-level, unique argument that no Bitcoiners have ever heard before, we humbly present, the history of “Bitcoin is a Bubble” in graphic terms, going back over a decade.

2013 Cycle

We start in 2013 when The Economist magazine declared Bitcoin to be a bubble in November as BTC cracked the $1,000 handle for the first time – they also declared “Bitcoin is expensive” and looking like a bubble earlier that year, in March 19, 2013 – when the Bitcoin spot price was… $59.

2017 Cycle

The next cycle peaked out in 2017 and by January, 2018 had plummeted all the way down to the $10,000 / BTC area, it prompted the New York Times to eulogize those foolish investors who tried to glom onto the phenom… “Remember Bitcoin? Some Investors Might Want to Forget” on December 28, 2018 – when the Bitcoin price was $3,653.13/BTC.

Even by this very next cycle, 2013 looked like a rounding error.

You’ll never guess what happened next…

2021 cycle

One of the staunchest sound-money advocates in the world became one of the most vociferous critics of Bitcoin ever seen on social media.

None other than Peter Schiff went all-in on being a no-coiner, which, as a long-time gold investor myself, I found puzzling.

It may be understandable that one may prefer precious metals to Bitcoin, or even eschew the latter if it was outside of their wheelhouse. But for a professional investor and capital allocator to be so opposed to Bitcoin, while incessantly employing the most uninformed objections to it (“backed by nothing”) belies a willful ignorance that would be extremely distressing to find in one’s financial advisor.

I’ve said it before: nobody who actually rolls up their sleeves and does the work on “why Bitcoin” ever comes out the other end saying “tulips, backed by nothing”. They may still say it’s not for them, but they won’t say that. 

Honourable Mention

We could never run out of fodder for establishment shills of the Cantillionaire class who either loathe Bitcoin because of what it represents (a threat to their position and power), or lower order sycophants who don’t understand it, because in true Upton Sinclair fashion, their livelihoods depend on them not understanding it.

• Paul Krugman (an example of the latter) declaring “Bitcoin is Evil” (2013) and “has no use case” (2018))

• World Economic Forum – who declared that Bitcoin would consume all the world’s electricity by 2020 (update: it didn’t).

• Most recently, the ECB put out a piece echoing the same old, tired objections… backed by nothing… intrinsic value zero *yawn*, calling it “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.

And of course, Jim Cramer’s legendary call in late January… “Bitcoin’s new theme is number go down”.

Bang on.

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) March 4, 2024

Where are we today?

So with Bitcoin on the cusp of racking up another all-time high, the first of this cycle – call it The 2025 Cycle – are we at the top?

Google trends seems to indicate we are nowhere close to a manic peak…

Doesn’t much look like a cycle-top, either… pic.twitter.com/FH84IGDmTW

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) March 4, 2024

Which means all the inflows into ETFs right now are probably mostly institutional.

What is most surprising to me on this cycle (my fourth Bitcoin cycle since becoming orange-pilled in 2013) is how fast it is unfolding this time.

The milestones this year:

✔️ Bitcoin recapturing the $1 trillion market cap

✔️ Bitcoin hitting new all-time-highs in other currencies

✔️ Bitcoin cracking $60K USD for the setup to new all-time highs

A new all-time high before the Bitcoin halving event in April seems baked-in (hell, it may happen before I get this post published) – and the next major milestone after that will be the $100K USD per BTC mark. Seems hard to think that won’t happen this year either.

Is it too late?

As a glimmering awareness that Bitcoin didn’t die on the last cycle begins to elbow its way into public consciousness – people may think they’ve missed the boat on this, but what I still look at is the relative size of the global bond market – about $150 trillion of “return free risk” vs Bitcoin, still only at just over a $1 trillion.

From The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto

My base case is that the destruction of the current, fiat-based global monetary system will result in a bond exodus – and that “conventional wisdom” now includes a small allocation to Bitcoin – at least 1% – possibly 3% to 5%. When you consider that 70% of all Bitcoin hasn’t moved in over a year – even in the face of this latest run, we’re going to have anywhere between $1.5 and $7.5 trillion coming into Bitcoin over the next few years, and competing for about 30% to, call it 50% of the total supply.

What will that do to the spot price? Here’s Tuur Demester on Marty Bent’s TFTC making a cogent case for $1 million Bitcoin. We’ll just have to wait and see…

*  *  *

Get on the Bombthrower mailing list here and receive a free copy of The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto, which outlined all this. However, by the time you read this it may already be too late to sign up for The Bitcoin Capitalist Letter: new subscriptions will be closed once Bitcoin hits a new all-time high.

Last summer, Chinese Prime Minister Li Qiang addressed a conference in Berlin and optimistically said: “When it rains hard, it gets muddy. But we must not bow our heads.” He added of the world’s second largest economy, “Keep your chin up! When the time comes, we will surely see a rainbow. The economy has a natural cycle, in China as well.”

But Western press is now going after the Chinese premier and the country’s increasingly opaque system and dealings with the outside world. Just ahead of his much anticipated address to the National People’s Congress this week, it has been confirmed that the nation’s number two top official won’t take questions during what was a long-standing press briefing.

“China’s Li Qiang will become the first premier in three decades to not hold a press briefing at the annual parliamentary meetings, removing a rare platform for investors to learn more about the nation’s policy direction as President Xi Jinping consolidates control over the world’s second-largest economy,” Bloomberg reports.

And what’s more is that this 30-year long tradition looks to be possibly permanently halted, according to more from the announcement: 

The country’s No. 2 official won’t take questions at the close of the National People’s Congress for the rest of its five-year term apart from in “special circumstances,” official spokesperson Lou Qinjian said at a Monday briefing in Beijing. This cohort of lawmakers will gather each year until 2027.

Not only had this Q&A briefing been going on annually since 1993, but its significance was in the fact that it provided a rare occasion for such a high-ranking Chinese official to interact and field public questions.

Ironically in recent years the National People’s Congress had touted the press briefing which largely focused on the state of the economy as “one of the important windows for observing China’s openness and transparency.”

But apparently there’s no pretending anymore, and as regional analyst Christopher Beddor has remarked, “This is a big loss, and yet another sign the government slowly becoming ever-more opaque, both to outsiders and even those within the system.”

So now China watchers can expected any broad economic commentary from Beijing to be even more highly choreographed and scripted. 

Beijing Is Expected to Unveil GDP Target Around 5% — A Goal Now Harder to Achieve

Premier Li Qiang will deliver government work report at NPC

Investors will scrutinize policy priorities as economy faltershttps://t.co/sXIKcUR0Z9

— Giovanni Staunovo🛢 (@staunovo) March 4, 2024

But one Shanghai-based professor of international relations, Josef Gregory Mahoney, has said these forums often lead Western observers to overhype narratives of “internal dissent within the party” based on informal exchange with the premier. He suggested, “Perhaps these are problems worth avoiding from the premier’s perspective.”