Month: June 2024

Watch Live on X, YouTube and Rumble

ZeroHedge is bringing together four prominent pundits to debate one of the most combustible topics of the day: illegal immigration across the porous US border.

Immigration is the most important political problem facing the US today according to Gallup and about a half-dozen other pollsters, not to mention at least half of America.

To debate this issue, we are joined by former Navy intel officer Jack Posobiec and author Ryan Girdusky, who will make the case in favor of a border crackdown and even an all-out immigration moratorium.

Debating against them will be The Hill‘s Robby Soave and Libertarian presidential Candidate Chase Oliver; they will argue that our economy needs immigrants and that our government should admit more of them.

The debate will be moderated by The Intercept’s Ryan Grim and Unherd’s Emily Jashinsky who host the Counter Points show on YouTube.

And so, without further ado, let’s get ready to rumble. 

https://t.co/KpY9V6Tzq3

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 26, 2024

Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Army issued new, more specific guidance on Wednesday to address extremism within its ranks and ensure disciplinary action against those who engage with or promote extremist views.

Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth signed off on a pair of memos, published on June 26, that refine how the service will handle protests and extremist or gang activity within the ranks, and report suspected prohibited behavior. One memo a directive for “Handling Protest, Extremist, and Criminal Gang Activities“ and the other is a directive for ”Reporting Prohibited Activities.”

The memo on Handling Protest, Extremist, and Criminal Gang Activities states that prohibited activity within the Army can include distributing extremist materials online. This new Army memo reinforces a policy approach articulated by the U.S. Department of Defense in a November 2021 memo, which states that “an action taken to replicate content from one online location to another” can qualify as distributing extremist content online. The new Army memo now states the prohibited online distribution of extremist activity can include liking, sharing, and “re-tweeting” said content.

“Military personnel are responsible for the content they publish on all personal and public internet domains, including social media platforms, blogs, websites, and applications,” the memo states.

The Army’s existing policy, updated in July of 2020, had previously said prohibited online conduct could include “hazing, bullying, harassment, discriminatory harassment, stalking, retaliation, or any other types of misconduct that undermines dignity and respect” but was less specific about online extremist activity, stating only that “military personnel must reject participation in extremist organizations and associated cyber activities.”

The new memo on Handling Protest, Extremist, and Criminal Gang Activities also states soldiers who “knowingly” display paraphernalia, words, or symbols in support of extremist activity, including on flags, clothing, tattoos, and bumper stickers—whether on or off a military installation—can run afoul of the Army’s prohibitions on extremist behavior.

The new memo does not provide an exhaustive list of what paraphernalia, words, or symbols may meet their definition of extremist material but does offer a definition of views and activities the Army includes in its definition of extremism:

1. Advocating or engaging in the use of unlawful force or other illegal means to deprive individuals of their rights under the U.S. Constitution or in any states, territories or political subdivisions thereof.
2. Advocating or engaging in unlawful force to achieve goals that are political, religious, discriminatory, or otherwise ideological in nature.
3. Advocating, engaging in, or supporting terrorism.
4. Advocating, engaging in, or supporting the overthrow of the federal government, or state, territory, and local governments using force, violence, or unconstitutional or other unlawful means.
5. Advocating or encouraging military, civilian, or contractor personnel within the [Department of Defense] DOD or U.S. Coast Guard to violate laws or disobey lawful orders.
6. Advocating widespread unlawful discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex (including pregnancy), gender identity, or sexual orientation.

The memo states that Army commands have several options for recourse against soldiers promoting those views. They include legal action under the military justice system, known as the uniformed code of military justice. Commands may also choose adverse administrative actions against soldiers alleged to have violated these prohibitions on extremist activity, including involuntary separating of soldiers, reassigning soldiers, revoking their security clearances, barring soldiers from continued service, or “other administrative or disciplinary action deemed appropriate by the commander, based on the specific facts and circumstances of the particular case.”

The Second Memo

The second memo, regarding how military officials should report suspected prohibited activity, seeks to establish a process for reporting suspicious activity to the DOD Deputy Inspector General (DIG) for Diversity and Inclusion and Extremism in the Military.

Appropriate Army authorities who receive an allegation that a soldier engaged in a prohibited activity must notify the soldier’s commander or another appropriate authority and the appropriate Army inspector general within 30 calendar days if that soldier is in the active component and within 60 calendar days if that soldier is in the Army’s reserve component. The Army inspector generals must then forward information they receive along to the DOD Deputy Inspector General for Diversity and Inclusion and Extremism in the Military within another 15 calendar days of receiving said notification.

Commanders are also instructed that they must ensure that a soldier’s permanent record in the Army Military Human Resource Record (AMHRR) is annotated if that soldier has received a court-martial conviction, nonjudicial punishment, or general officer’s memorandum of reprimand for actively participating in extremist activities.

The reporting memo instructs Army commanders to periodically remind soldiers to avoid engaging in extremist activity.

The memo also advises Army commanders that they should consider command-directed mental health evaluations and financial counseling sessions for soldiers showing signs of potential involvement in extremist activities.

Just when you thought the wave of illegal immigration coming from the U.S.’s southern border was demoralizing enough, it appears that something else may be drifting its way up from Mexico.

According to a new report from the Daily Mail, beaches in San Diego have been shut down due to a “disgusting discovery”, which it described as “sewage creating frighteningly high levels of bacteria in the open waters”. 

The report says that water contact closures have been issued for Silver Strand Shoreline, Imperial Beach Shorelines, and the Tijuana Slough Shoreline along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Additionally, advisories were issued for La Jolla, Children’s Pool, Coronado, Coronado Lifeguard Tower, Ocean Beach, Dog Beach, San Diego River outlet, Mission Bay, North Cove, and Vacation Isle, the Mail reported.

Imperial Beach, ranked as the dirtiest beach in the U.S., has bright yellow warning signs due to sewage flowing in from Tijuana, the Mail said, citing KGTV.

Dr. Marvel Harrison was quoted as saying: “The level of stress when you smell the stench, when you get sick and you worry about your children, and the level of stress and the depression is real.”

“We need our state and federal governments to declare a state of emergency,” added San Diego County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer. “Our community deserves clean air and clean water, and we will not rest until this is resolved.”

The report noted that out of “thousands” of water samples from “across the nation” tested by The Surfrider Foundation, every single sample from Imperial Beach turned up “bacteria counts that exceeded the state’s health standard for recreational waters”. 

City officials plan to gather data and secure funding to address the sewage problem affecting the beach city.

The Surfrider Foundation reported that 64% of tested sites had unsafe bacteria levels, with California accounting for a quarter of these samples. Other polluted locations include Linda Mar Beach in Pacifica and the mouth of San Luis Obispo Creek.

Authored by Connor O’Keefe via The Mises Institute,

On Sunday, activists from the environmentalist organization Extinction Rebellion stormed the green in the final, pivotal moments of the Travelers Championship, a professional golf tournament. The protesters tossed red and white chalk and smoke bombs before being tackled to the ground by police. The stunt came days after two protesters with the group Just Stop Oil, a youth-led offshoot of Extinction Rebellion, sprayed orange paint on Stonehenge.

The environmentalist protesters who do stunts like this are refreshingly honest about the destructive nature of their ambitions.

They see the comforts and leisures of modern life as maladies to be eradicated in the name of saving the climate.

But while the means these protesters used in the two high-profile stunts last week have come under wide condemnation, the environmentalist ends of such groups enjoyed blind acceptance in the news media amid a couple dramatic heat waves playing out around the world.

Temperatures rose to record-breaking heights for June across the eastern United States late last week and over the weekend. The United Kingdom experienced a heat wave that, while mocked by many in the US for being laughably mild, brought temperatures far higher than the region is used to. Most dramatically, extreme heat killed over a thousand people during this year’s Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Overall, more than fourteen hundred temperature records were broken around the world last week.

The media has had a field day showing scary red maps and bringing on hysterical “experts” to terrify audiences into thinking it’s only a matter of time before we’re all roasting to death. Unless, we’re told, we “stop putting carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere,” as Bill Nye said in the clip linked above and the Extinction Rebellion protesters demanded on the eighteenth green on Sunday.

But if the goal is to avoid heat-related deaths, the worst thing to do is ban fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels, through technologies like air conditioning and refrigeration, make us safer from heat waves like those experienced last week.

Air conditioning is an incredible invention that is too often taken for granted. Back in the 1840s, long before air conditioning, a Florida doctor named John Gorrie found that his patients recovered better from disease when placed in a cool room. Gorrie developed a system to cool hospital rooms, but it required huge blocks of ice to be cut and transported from frozen lakes and rivers in the northern states. Gorrie’s system made no sense logistically, but his method for cooling a room laid the foundation for what would become modern air conditioning.

Sixty years later, a New York engineer named Willis Carrier expanded upon Gorrie’s design by utilizing cooling coils to heat and cool air. These first air conditioning units took up an entire room and cost as much as $1.5 million each in today’s dollars. But as Carrier and his competitors raced to improve upon their designs, air conditioning units became smaller, more efficient, and more affordable.

A big problem with early air conditioning units was that the compounds they used as refrigerants, such as ammonia and propane, were toxic, flammable, explosive, and not very effective. Then, in 1928, Thomas Midgley Jr. and his team in the Frigidaire division of General Motors synthesized the first chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), which they named Freon.

The adoption of CFCs like Freon provided a major boost to air conditioning. In the 1930s, when the US experienced the most severe heat waves in its history, air conditioning units began to be installed in movie theaters. Around the same time, the first window-mounted units were developed. But it wasn’t until after World War II that air conditioning started to become affordable and compact enough to become a common fixture in American homes. By the 1960s, most new homes in the US had central air conditioning.

Air conditioning did not merely make life more comfortable; it saved lives. Heat-related deaths fell by 80 percent after the adoption of air conditioning. Regions like the arid Southwest and the humid Southeast became more inhabitable for more people.

But as Mark Thornton has pointed out, the benefits of air conditioning extend far beyond staying cool on a hot day.

Because architects no longer needed to rely on windows for ventilation, air conditioning allowed for larger, sturdier buildings that could extend higher than had ever been possible. These skyscrapers significantly increased the supply of housing and office space in urban areas without requiring more land. That meant the air conditioning making residences and offices more comfortable was also making them more affordable.

The cooling and dehumidifying effects of air conditioning also help conserve things like books and historical artifacts. Thanks to modern HVAC systems, every major city in the country can have libraries, archives, and museums. That wasn’t true before. In fact, Willis Carrier first invented air conditioning not to cool hot rooms but to prevent magazine pages from wrinkling for a Brooklyn publishing company.

Air conditioning has helped enormously with textile production, surgeries, plant and animal breeding, pharmaceuticals, and transportation—not to mention the preservation and transportation of food through refrigeration. It is also crucial for cooling the vast data centers that, together, power the internet.

That’s all to say that it’s hard to overstate how much the world we all live in depends on our ability to control our indoor climates, regardless of the outdoor temperatures. But these systems rely on two central components: energy and refrigerants. And both of these components have come under attack from environmentalists and their allies in government.

Environmentalists are very clear that they want the world’s governments to force their populations off fossil fuels. They fantasize about a world where, after a few cleverly concocted government policies are enacted, the world transitions to energy sources like solar and wind, the weather improves, and we all get to live in an egalitarian, plant-filled, postscarcity utopia.

But those ambitions will never leave the realm of fantasy. So-called renewable sources like solar and wind power cannot support the world’s population at the current level of development. At best, things like air conditioning—which requires a lot of energy—will become more expensive.

More likely, modern HVAC systems will become unavailable for large swaths of the population. Because, in addition to the effort to ban fossil fuels, today’s environmentalists have also set their sights on the refrigerants these systems rely on.

It began in the nineties when the world’s governments seized on a scare that CFCs were causing a hole in the ozone layer (which was essentially a complete hoax) to ban the refrigerant and force a transition to a worse alternative called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). The coerced adoption of HFCs made refrigerators, air conditioning systems, and even asthma inhalers more expensive and less effective. That’s the big reason why, as Thornton pointed out in the article linked above, air conditioning’s march to affordability reversed course in the 1990s and now costs so much.

But it gets worse. The US government has already passed legislation to phase in a total ban on HFCs. Most bans are set to kick in over the next couple of years, but unlike the CFC ban thirty years ago, there is no clear alternative this time around. If it’s mentioned at all, the other options presented are the same toxic, flammable, inefficient compounds like ammonia and propane that were used in the early air conditioning units ninety-five years ago. Companies have begun hoarding HFCs as the phaseout progresses and, earlier this year, the first arrest was made for smuggling the refrigerant into the country.

As air conditioning becomes even less affordable and available, all the benefits outlined above begin to slip out of reach as well. Life grows more expensive because internet, food, and rent prices will rise as the supply of data centers, refrigeration systems, and urban housing takes a hit. And, ironically, the warmest parts of the country will become less inhabitable, not because of a change in the climate, but because so-called green policies are destroying our ability to make them livable.

So, in a sense, environmentalists are right when they warn that heat waves will become more dangerous. But it’s not because of small increases in their average peak temperature. It’s because of the environmentalists themselves.

In a rare moment which appears a somewhat positive development (or at least it’s not more immediate escalation), the US and Russian defense chiefs spoke by phone Tuesday for the first time since March 2023.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin initiated the call, and the timing is important given it comes following Sunday’s deadly Ukraine missile attack on a crowded Sevastopol beach which killed five people and injured 124 more, including children.

Moscow has blamed Washington for providing the long-range MGM-140 ATACMS systems used in the attack, and has even said Kiev likely had satellite and targeting help from the Pentagon.

The Guardian noted that “The two sides gave widely divergent accounts of the discussion – the first between US defense secretary Lloyd Austin and Russia’s defense minister Andrei Belousov.”

Russian defense chief Belousov warned Austin against continued arms supplies to Kiev, citing the dangers of serious escalation. 

As for the US version of the call, the Pentagon readout was scant, only saying that Austin “emphasized the importance of maintaining lines of communication amid Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine.”

The Kremlin is still pointing to Washington actions as being behind an ongoing escalation:

Russia’s defense ministry said Washington and Kyiv bore “responsibility for a deliberate missile strike on peaceful residents,” which it said used US-supplied ATACMS missiles.

Russia further called it a “terrorist act” and according to more details:

Videos posted on social media showed people running from the beach as explosions went off and people in swimming outfits carrying a stretcher. AFP could not verify their authenticity.

A local news channel on Telegram, ChP Sevastopol, cited witnesses as saying that an elderly woman was killed as she swam in the sea.

But despite this, elsewhere there were other rare positives. On Tuesday Russia and Ukraine conducted a prisoner swap involving 90 total POWs.

Sunday’s strike involved cluster munitions dropping on men, women, and children at a Sevastopol beach…

The moment when Cluster munitions from the ATACMS supplied by the United States is injuring and killing people on the beach in Sevastopol, Crimea couple a days ago. pic.twitter.com/WDQQxLeHTs

— I’m No Angel (@HappyCamper2626) June 25, 2024

This was the second biggest swap since May 31st, when the two sides returned 75 captives each. That exchange had come after a long lull in exchanges, and there is likely more to come this summer.

Authored by Will Porter via The Libertarian Institute,

The State Department has acknowledged that America’s top partner in Syria, the Kurdish-led “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF), is still using underage fighters after more than 10 years of similar allegations. The Pentagon continues to work closely with the group regardless, as US troops illegally occupy large swaths of territory in northeastern Syria.

Published Tuesday, the department’s 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report highlighted a number of armed factions employing child soldiers in Syria, among them notorious terrorist outfits like ISIS and al-Qaeda as well as more US-friendly groups.

“The recruitment or use of children in combat and support roles in Syria remains common, and since the beginning of 2018 international observers reported continued incidents of recruitment and use by armed groups,” the report said.

Those include several Kurdish militias, such as the People’s Protection Units (YPG), an affiliated all-female brigade known as the YPJ, as well as the US-backed and armed SDF. The latter org is an umbrella group containing several others, including the YPG, and has long served as Washington’s main proxy force in Syria.

Another related Kurdish faction, the Revolutionary Youth Movement, was said to have tricked minors into joining up using “fraudulent announcements for educational courses in northeast Syria.”

Although the State Department said the SDF was implementing a 2019 UN-mandated “action plan” to end the practice, it noted reports that “SDF-affiliated armed groups recruited and used children in 2022 and 2023.”

Allegations of child trafficking and military recruitment have dogged the YPG for more than a decade, with rights groups reporting cases as far back as 2013. While YPG leadership claims to have ordered an end to the practice that year, the problem has only worsened since.

In 2020, the United Nations found the YPG, “under the umbrella of the Syrian Democratic Forces,” was the top recruiter of child fighters in Syria with 283 documented cases the prior year – even beating out the local al-Qaeda affiliate. While the UN later acknowledged SDF efforts to crack down on the use of underage fighters, it still recorded dozens of cases in April 2021.

Despite the official admission in the new State Department review, the US military continues a close partnership with the SDF and, by extension, the YPG. On Tuesday, the Pentagon deployed 40 vehicles and other hardware to reinforce a base in northwestern Syria, where US troops are embedded with Kurdish fighters. That move followed a similar deployment to Hasakah reported last April.

Throughout a decade of external efforts to topple Assad, the West and Gulf states facilitated the entry of tens of thousands of foreign jihadist fighters…

American forces have illegally occupied Syria for years despite repeated objections from the government in Damascus. While Washington insists the presence is necessary to ensure the lasting defeat of the Islamic State, US troops continue to hold significant energy resources in the oil-rich northeast, effectively controlling one-third of the country with the help of its Kurdish allies.

Authored by Paul Cudenac via Off-Guardian.org,

Shocking evidence is emerging from Australia and New Zealand of how the climate scam is being used to impose a techno-totalitarian smart-city future.

The criminocratic global imperialists often use their Commonwealth colonies to try out the most insidious escalations of their tyranny – think of Canada, New Zealand and Australia during Covid.

We can therefore assume that this is going to be the blueprint for the roll-out of their Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda across the world.

The sinister scheme in question, called “Managed Retreat”, has been exposed by independent researcher Kate Mason on her excellent Substack blog aimed at “deconstructing 4IR narratives”.

The idea is that exaggerated “modelling” of the imagined effects of “climate change” is being used to define certain areas as unsuitable for human settlement.

Working hand in hand with the state is the insurance industry – long a central part of the corrupt criminocratic empire – which deems homes in these areas to be “uninsurable”.

Banks are also playing their part (of course!) saying they are unwilling to provide mortgages for these “uninsurable” properties.

In her latest article, Kate refers to a TV report about Kensington Banks, near Melbourne city centre, which has been newly declared a flood zone.

She writes: “Property prices are expected to plummet by 20 percent. I think that’s rather conservative – who is going to buy in a flood zone? Unless it’s a developer who will raze it all to the ground and build a Smart Resilient complex”.

Meanwhile, in New Zealand, residents are up in arms about attempts to impose “retreat” from coastal areas under the pretext of a predicted rise in sea levels.

As this media report shows, they are not buying the scaremongering climate propaganda.

Tim Rees said. “I’ve lived by Paraparaumu Beach since 1965 and the beach is actually getting bigger. For 45 years I’ve dived off Kāpiti Island and the rocks are still at the same height at low tide”.

Added Tania Lees: “The science isn’t settled and there is no consensus. We don’t believe the sea levels are rising significantly and [that] we will all be flooded.”

Central and local government couldn’t fund “a process on this scale”, she said. “So far, the ratepayers have paid in excess of $4 million for the Takutai Kāpiti process.

“We simply can’t afford to spend more. If implemented, managed retreat would be in excess of $1 billion.”

As for the agenda behind all this, Kate writes:

Finding the information on climate change modelling and insurance has joined the dots for me regarding the enormous amount of pack and stack housing developments going ahead in Australia.

They’re going to need to put us all somewhere when our houses are uninsurable and we have to sell them for a pittance.

It is clear that this is ‘Resilient’ Smart Cities. Everything hooked up to the internet and data collected, stored and used as modelling to dictate increasingly dystopian government measures of control and enforcement”.

By way of confirmation, she reveals that the Insurance Council of Australia, involved in Managed Retreat, works within the Public Private Partnership model and adheres to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, even being a foundation member of the United Nations Principles for Sustainable Insurance.

The UN’s smart gulag agenda was paraded in their 80-page booklet entitled “Centering People in Smart Cities: A playbook for local and regional governments”, as we reported in 2022.

Also in 2022, a body called the Australian Climate Council released a study which estimated that 1 in 25 of all homes and commercial buildings in the country would become effectively uninsurable by 2030 because of “worsening extreme weather events”.

River flooding posed the biggest risk, according to the study, with flash flooding and bushfires identified as the other main hazards contributing to properties becoming “uninsurable”.

As well as calling for “managed relocations”, the report stressed the need for “upscaling public investments in resilience” and to “support communities to ‘build back better’”.

It declared: “Towns, cities and communities must be rebuilt – where appropriate to do so – in a way that takes into account the inevitable future changes in climate and makes them more resilient”.

It comes as little surprise that this report was proudly showcased on the website of the World Economic Forum…

*  *  *

Originally published in the latest edition of The Acorn newsletter, you can read the full bulletin and subscribe HERE or follow Winter Oak on X/Twitter. The excellent SubStack which inspired it is written by Kate Mason, another recommended follow.

National security concerns are rising as the Biden administration’s apparent experiment with open southern and northern borders has facilitated the greatest illegal alien invasion this nation has ever seen. Customs data suggests that at least 10 million migrants have crossed into the US illegally during Biden’s first term. Alarming data shows a spike in military-aged men and dangerous terror-watch list suspects who have also illegally crossed the border or been apprehended.  

Democrats have rolled out the red carpet for illegal aliens while gaslighting the American people and blaming everyone but themselves for the migrant crisis. The White House has been watching its polling data slide and decided late last month to sign an executive order to limit the number of illegals flooding the nation.

However, any efforts by the White House or Democrats to salvage their reputations after the biggest policy blunder in a generation are likely too late. The damage is irreversible, with 10 million illegals roaming the country freely. In recent weeks, the nation has been shocked by some migrants committing heinous crimes, including the rape and murder of young American women. 

The rise in illegal crossings and suspected terrorist encounters at the southern border has been enough of a red flag for the Special Operations Association of America (SOAA) to release an open letter of concern about the “current heightened risk of terrorist attacks against targets inside the United States and both US and allied interests abroad.”

Here’s SOAA’s full letter, dated June 25:

June 25, 2024

An Open Letter of Concern,

Special Operations Association of America (SOAA) represents thousands of Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Marine Raiders, Air Force Air Commandos, and other special operators who have fought and currently serve on behalf of our nation. We are gravely concerned by the current heightened risk of terrorist attacks against targets inside the United States and both US and allied interests abroad. Our complete withdrawal from Afghanistan, without a viable stay-behind or over-the-horizon counterterrorism and intelligence capability to suppress threats, has created a vacuum in the region in which anti-American terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, are flourishing once again.

The United States has lost significant intelligence collection capabilities in the region, leaving federal authorities blind and deaf to emerging threats emanating from the region. The creation of new and reestablishment of previous terrorist training camps within Afghanistan has led to successful, deadly attacks by the Islamic State’s regional branch against targets in Iran and Russia and elsewhere, providing further credence to the notion that the US is at risk. This heightened risk has been verified by multiple departments and agencies of the federal government, mainstream journalists and publications, former senior officials from both parties, and from former allies with whom we maintain communication.

This risk is compounded by developments in the Middle East and in the porous, unsecured southern border through which we have seen numerous instances of individuals on terrorist watchlists and others from adversarial countries attempt to enter the US — and those are the ones we know about only because they were detected. We do not know how many other threats are already currently inside the US.

At the same time, the US has continued to send the Taliban millions of dollars for “counterterrorism assistance,” which has proved to be only marginally successful due to a lack of partners on the ground in Afghanistan. Millions more in aid is being repurposed by the Taliban to bolster their own operations.

As former White House and CIA Intelligence Agency Mike Morell recently wrote, “The Terrorism warning lights are blinking red again — echoes of the run-up to 9/11.”

Time is running out, and urgent executive action is needed to address this ever-increasing threat to US national security, our families, our allies, and our homeland.

Signed, The Hon. Christopher Miller, Chair Daniel Elkins, President Alex Plitsas, Secretary Jaclyn Scott, Director Dr. Newton Howard, Director Keith Pellegrini, Director Doug Livermore, Vice President Christopher Lay, Treasurer Jess Monaco, Director Scott Mann, Director David Cook, Executive Director

The letter was first published on X by Fox News’ Lucas Tomlinson. 

Special Operations Association of America warns its members ‘gravely concerned’ about terrorist threat to U.S. after withdrawal from Afghanistan and the ‘unsecured southern border’ pic.twitter.com/eGqK9JJgvG

— Lucas Tomlinson (@LucasFoxNews) June 26, 2024

None of what SOAA is saying should come as a major surprise to readers. We have detailed in numerous reports how open borders are a red carpet for criminals and terrorists into America:

• Terrorist Caught Illegally Crossing Border Says He Was ‘Here To Make A Bomb’

• DHS Admits Border Has Been Open To Criminals And Terrorists

• Iranian Assassin On The Loose In America, Targeting Trump-era Officials

• 17 Individuals On FBI Terror Watch List Caught Attempting Entry At Southern Border

• “More Red Flags Than Before 9-11”: Ohio Sheriff Warns American People Of Worsening Border Invasion

For more on the border discussion, we are featuring a special ZeroHedge debate on this topic tonight at 7 PM ET.

Former Navy intel officer Jack Posobiec, Libertarian presidential Candidate Chase Oliver, The Hill’s Robby Soave, and author Ryan Girdusky will be on the debate stage. The debate will be moderated by The Intercept’s Ryan Grim and Unherd’s Emily Jashinsky who host the Counter Points show on YouTube.

Tomorrow at 7pm ET, streaming live on @zerohedge and @X

The Border Debate

Featuring @JackPosobiec & @RyanGirdusky vs @ChaseForLiberty & @robbysoave
Moderated by @ryangrim & @emilyjashinsky pic.twitter.com/3lDQhLRflM

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 25, 2024

Tune in live this evening at 7 PM ET on the ZeroHedge homepage, X feed, Rumble channel, or YouTube. The debate will also be uploaded the following day to the ZeroHedge Spotify page.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

As the nation heads into the July 4th holiday, we have rarely been more divided as a people. Ironically, we are still debating the core values that define us, particularly the right to free speech. Indeed, “debate” hardly captures the rising anger and animosity from campuses to Congress. That is also nothing new.

While I have called this “an age of rage,” it is not our first.

The United States was born in rage.

Roughly 250 years ago, a group calling itself the Sons of Liberty boarded three ships and dumped almost 100,000 pounds of English tea into the Boston harbor. The “Boston Tea Party” is still celebrated as an act of defiance that helped spark the American Revolution.

It was also an act of rage, a key moment that is the focus of my book out this week, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

As a nation, we have gone through almost cyclic periods of unhinged rage, including periods of what I call “state rage.” The first victim has always been free speech, including in our current age of rage. Indeed, this is arguably the most dangerous anti-free speech period in our history.

“The Indispensable Right“ is a reference to the description of Justice Louis Brandeis of core value in our nation. It is also a reference that captures our inherent conflict with free speech. Brandeis and his colleague Oliver Wendell Holmes are enshrined as civil libertarians who became the “great dissenters,” arguing for rights that remained unrealized for decades.

Yet, these two jurists would support some of the most abusive denials of free speech in our history. Holmes would supply the single most regrettable line of any opinion: that free speech protections do not allow citizens to shout fire in a crowded theater. That paraphrasing of his decision in Schenck v. United States continues to be used today as a rationalization for censorship and limits on free speech.

On free speech, Brandeis and Holmes were no heroes. Our true heroes are detailed in this book, a collection of true dissenters — anarchists, unionists, communists, feminists and others who risked everything to fight for their right to speak.

George Bernard Shaw once said “a reasonable man adjusts himself to the world. An unreasonable man expects the world to adjust itself to him. Therefore, all progress is made by unreasonable people.”

These are stories of wonderfully unreasonable people like Anita Whitney, a feminist who left a family of privilege to fight for social and political justice. The descendent of a family on the Mayflower and niece of Supreme Court Justice Cyrus W. Field, Whitney defied threats of the police that she would be arrested if she spoke in California in 1919 in Oakland.

With police standing around on stage, she refused to be silent and spoke against the lynchings of Blacks occurring around the country. Her abusive conviction would ultimately go before the court (with Brandeis and Holmes) and they would vote to uphold it.

Time and again, this country has abandoned our free speech values as political dissidents were met with state rage in the form of mass crackdowns and imprisonments. It is an unvarnished story of free speech in America and for better or worse, it is our story.

Yet, we have much to learn from this history as this pattern now repeats itself. The book explains why we are living in the most dangerous anti-free speech period in our history.

In the past, free speech has found natural allies in academia and the media. That has changed with a type of triumvirate — the government, corporations, and academia — in a powerful alliance against free speech values.

Ironically, while these groups refer to the unprecedented threat of “fake news” and “disinformation,” those were the very same rationales used first by the Crown and then the U.S. government to crack down on free speech in the early American republic.

The difference is the magnitude of the current censorship system from campuses to corporations to Congress. Law professors are even calling for changing the First Amendment as advancing an “excessively individualistic” view of free speech. The amendment would allow the government to curtail speech to achieve “equity” and protect “dignity.”

Others, including President Biden, have called for greater censorship while politicians and pundits denounce defenders of free speech as “Putin lovers” and “insurrectionist sympathizers.”

Despite watching the alarming rise of this anti-free speech movement and the rapid loss of protections in the West, there is still reason to be hopeful.

For those of us who believe that free speech is a human right, there is an inherent and inescapable optimism. We are wired for free speech as humans. We need to speak freely, to project part of ourselves into the world around us. It is essential to being fully human.

In the end, this alliance may reduce our appetite for free speech but we will never truly lose our taste for it. It is in our DNA. That is why this is not our first or our last age of rage. However, it is not the rage that defines us. It is free speech that defines us.

*  *  *

Jonathan Turley is a Fox News Media contributor and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster, June 18, 2024).

In the latest annual farce meant to boost confidence in the banking sector, moments ago the Fed announced that all the biggest US banks passed annual stress test with flying colors, paving the way for higher shareholder payouts as the industry awaits a watered-down version of a separate proposal for stricter capital requirements. Of course, all the banks that collapsed last March passed the “stress test” too, so there’s that.

While the largest banks faced steeper hypothetical losses this year due to riskier portfolios, and the group would take nearly $685 billion in losses driving a larger drop in capital than in last year’s scenario, the results were “within the range of recent stress tests,” the regulator said, and furthermore each firm stayed above its minimum capital requirements during a hypothetical recession, which of course is even more farcical than the Fed’s forecasting record as the central bank can’t possibly imagine what the next recession will look like. As such it may not be a bad idea to actually stress the “stress test” but since that will never happen, we may as well carry on.

This round of the annual farce exam included 31 banks, each with at least $100 billion in assets. For the group as a whole, the so-called common equity Tier 1 capital, the highest-quality regulatory capital, would bottom out at 9.9%, well above the 4.5% minimum requirement. Of course, this is the same Fed that predicted that there would be no bank failures in a non-recession scenario in 2023 so feel free to laugh at any moment.

“The goal of our test is to help to ensure that banks have enough capital to absorb losses in a highly stressful scenario.” Michael Barr, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, said in a statement. “This test shows that they do.”

What Michael meant is that the goal of the test is to greenlight even more stock buybacks and dividends to the banks and bankers which are also owners of the Fed itself, in what can only pass as a grotesque conflict of interest. And the fact that year after year all the banks pass with flying colors is not even worth commenting any more.

While every firm passed, results varied among them. At JPMorgan, the biggest US bank, the CET1 ratio would decline to 12.5%, from 15% at year-end. Among the megabanks, Wells Fargo’s CET1 fell to the lowest level at 8.1%, from 11.4% at year-end. That they’re so far above the minimum is likely to bolster their case against additional dramatic increases.

And speaking of test scenarios, this year’s “severely adverse” scenario included a 10% peak in US unemployment, a 55% drop in equity prices and a 40% decline in commercial real estate prices. As with last year, a subset of firms with large trading businesses faced an additional “global market shock” component involving equity price declines, a sharp rise in short-term Treasury rates and a weaker dollar.

According to the Fed, the losses that would be created by a a “severe recession” are projected to be $684 billion and comprise:

• $571 billion in loan losses, accounting for 83 percent of total losses;
• $16 billion in additional losses from items such as loans booked under the fair-value option (see table 7), accounting for 2 percent of total losses;
• $91 billion in trading and counterparty losses at the 10 banks with substantial trading, processing, or custodial operations, accounting for 13 percent of total losses; and
• $6 billion in securities losses, accounting for 1 percent of total losses

For loans measured at amortized cost, projected aggregate losses are $571 billion, with the loan loss rate at 7.1 percent. These loan losses flow into pre-tax net income through the projection of provisions for loan and lease losses, which is $573 billion in aggregate and takes into account banks’ established allowances for credit losses at the start of the projection horizon.

Projected consumer loan losses represent a smaller share (40 percent) of total losses than commercial loan losses (43 percent). The loan portfolio that constitutes the largest amount of losses is credit cards, representing 26 percent of total losses.

Total loan loss rates vary significantly across banks, ranging between 1.3 percent and 18.7 percent. . This range results from differences in loan portfolio composition, which materially affects losses because projected loss rates vary significantly for different types of loans. For example, aggregate loan loss rates range from 2.3 percent on domestic first-lien mortgages to 17.6 percent on credit cards due to the sensitivity and historical performance of these loans. Some loan portfolios are sensitive to home prices or unemployment rates and may experience high stressed loss rates due to the considerable stress on these factors in the severely adverse scenario

Aggregate trading and counterparty losses, which also flow into pre-tax net income, are $91 billion for the 10 banks subject to the global market shock component and/or the largest counterparty default component of the severely adverse scenario. Individual bank losses range from $1 billion to $18 billion, resulting from the specific risk characteristics of each bank’s trading positions and counterparty exposures, inclusive of hedges. Importantly, these projected losses are based on the trading positions and counterparty exposures held by banks on the same as-of date (October 13, 2023) and could have varied if they had been based on a different date.

Here is the full list of projected loan losses by banks for the 31 banks in the stress test. What is remarkable is that Goldman, the former master of the universe, now has the second crappiest, subprimiest credit card portfolio of all US banks; only Ally bank is worse….

… something which wasn’t lost on the market.

The results Wednesday underscore “the usefulness of the extra capital that banks have built in recent years above their minimum requirements,” Barr said. “Because of that extra capital cushion, we expect that large banks would be able to continue extending credit to households and businesses during a time of financial stress.”

Capital requirements have been a topic of fierce debate in Washington in the year since the last stress test. Last July, the Fed and other regulators unveiled a long-awaited plan for more stringent rules that they said would result in a 16% hike for banks with more than $100 billion in assets.

But since there have been no bank failures in the past 15 months, and everyone forgot just how insolvent the US banking system is with over $500BN in unrealized losses, this push was quickly abandoned.

And so, bank bosses launched a lobbying blitz, arguing they already have enough capital and the new rules would hurt consumers and businesses. They pushed for major revisions or scrapping the plan entirely, and they won: earlier this year Fed Chair Jerome Powell said there would be “broad and material changes.”

Still, Barr re-emphasized the need for banks to hold onto more capital in the statement Wednesday. He attributed the higher losses this year to higher credit card balances and delinquencies; riskier corporate credit portfolios; and a combination of higher costs and lower fee revenue in recent years driving less net income to counter losses. Those three factors “suggest required capital buffers should be larger,” Barr said.

According to Bloomberg, the Fed has shown the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency a three-page document of possible revisions to last year’s proposal that would soften the capital increase to as little as 5%. Officials haven’t reached an agreement, and it’s unclear whether they can finish a revised plan before the US presidential election in November.

Meanwhile, the biggest US banks have wasted no time to put the “incident” of March 2023 behind them when only an emergency intervention by the Fed prevented a wholesale bank run and firesale from all banks, and signaled optimism about their capital levels this year, ramping up buybacks even ahead of the stress test results. The six largest lenders bought back more than $14 billion of stock in the first quarter, a 73% jump from the pace in the second half of last year. Executives have touted excess capital in recent months, including a surprise dividend hike at JPMorgan that CEO Jamie Dimon said was because “our capital cup runneth over.”

The Fed said Wednesday that it expects banks to wait until after 4:30 p.m. Friday to publicize any plans for dividends and buybacks. The agency expects stress capital buffers, the required cushion driven by stress-test results, to go up in aggregate as the liquidity that the Fed feeds banks via various emergency mechanisms and acronyms always eventually leaks out to their shareholders about a year later.

Read the full stress test results here.