Month: November 2025

Authored by Buck Sexton via DailyReckoning.com,

If I looked you in the eye and told you the Rocky Mountains don’t exist, you’d think I was crazy.

But give me time, and I could make you believe it.

I wouldn’t need threats or force. I wouldn’t really even need a good argument.

All I’d need is steady, confident repetition. The kind that comes from the voices you already trust.

Say, you lived out on the eastern plains of Colorado. The land is flat and the horizon looks empty.

You’ve got a job, a family, responsibilities. You’re not driving hours west to confirm whether a mountain range is sitting there; it’s not like it’s urgent.

So you don’t push back. You just absorb the disinformation.

And soon enough, you’re not just accepting the idea, you’re defending it.

Your identity becomes wrapped in the belief that the world is exactly as you were told it is.

Any challenge to that belief feels like a personal attack.

Then one afternoon, you drive a little farther than usual and there it is. The massive, immovable Rockies, exactly where they’ve always been

And instead of asking, “Why was I misled?” you lash out.

Who put these mountains here? This disrupts everything! Who do I blame?

And people just like you begin insisting that the problem isn’t the lie… It’s the chain of mountains.

Nothing changed about the Rockies, only your relationship to reality changed.

This is how real manipulation works.

Not by controlling your actions, but by controlling the lens you use to see the world. So when reality finally shows up, you treat reality itself as the enemy.

And that is exactly where America is right now.

The Mountains in Plain Sight

The same psychological trick is being played on the entire country.

For years, people have been told certain problems simply don’t exist and that the “mountains” rising out of our national landscape are illusions.

You know the list: The border isn’t wide open, crime is down, failing schools are fine, our cities are flourishing. Nothing is wrong with the country’s direction.

Millions of people have accepted these claims not because they’ve verified them, but because they’ve heard them repeated endlessly by institutions they once trusted.

And when the evidence becomes undeniable, their instinct isn’t to reconsider…

It’s to rage.

This is Manufactured Mass Hysteria.

And that’s the single greatest danger facing the U.S. now…

Millions of Americans walking straight into the shadow of mountains they’ve convinced themselves don’t exist.

This Is What Actually Breaks a Country

I’m coming out with a book on this phenomenon, called Manufacturing Delusion. I’ll share more about it in a moment, but the core idea is simple:

Americans can handle hardship. We cannot handle insanity.

This country has survived world wars, economic depressions, political violence and cultural upheaval. We adapted. We endured. We rebuilt.

Hardship isn’t new to us. But widespread derangement will break us as a nation.

And unfortunately, that’s exactly where left-wing politics has taken us. We’re in a very dangerous moment when mass delusion is the preferred weapon of mobilization.

They make people crazy… And they make them crazy on purpose.

Totalitarian systems have used these methods for more than a century. The architecture of mind control has been studied, refined, tested and deployed across the world.

Propaganda, psychological conditioning and censorship operate on predictable principles.

Once you understand these principles, you’ll start to see them everywhere.

This is the material I lay out in my book — the mechanics of manipulation, the scientific foundation of how it works, the incentives that keep it running and why it’s happening right now.

We don’t have the luxury of viewing this as an academic exercise, because the consequences are unfolding in real time.

The cost of this engineered insanity is rising, and the country is feeling it.

How the Conditioning Nearly Killed a President

You don’t have to look far to see what manufactured delusion produces.

Look at what happened this week.

The country already knew that a young man tried to assassinate President Trump in July 2024. That part has been public for more than a year.

Only now do we have a clear picture of who the attacker actually was.

And the profile is exactly what you would expect in an era shaped by psychological destabilization…

A self-identified “they/them,” furry-obsessed, left-wing tranTIFA extremist.

Someone whose entire online presence is a collage of ideological confusion, identity instability and rage manufactured by years of propaganda.

This guy wasn’t writing insane stuff in his basement somewhere…

This was a person shaped — deliberately — by the emotional machinery of the modern left.

And he came within inches of killing a president and derailing a U.S. election.

Inches.

We were one breath away from a national trauma that would have set the country on fire.

We’re still processing and grieving for the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk — the most important conservative activist in the country.

In just a little over a year’s span, the American right nearly lost both its leading grassroots architect and its most consequential political leader.

A society does not produce this level of violence by accident.

It produces it through years of cultivated derangement.

I noticed the build-up long before most people did. I can’t share every detail, but anyone paying attention knew where the pressure was building.

That’s why I wrote Manufacturing Delusion… to explain exactly how a country ends up in the place we now find ourselves with institutions saturated by hysteria and individuals pushed to the brink by narratives designed to destabilize them.

This is the outcome of widespread psychological manipulation.

Trump Derangement Syndrome

This week, Fox News had psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert on to talk about this exact problem.

You know how we operate here at Money & Power. We don’t give into theatrics. But what Alpert described is staggering.

According to him, roughly 75% of his patients are hyper-fixated on Donald Trump.

They can’t sleep, they feel restless — traumatized, in fact, by President Trump.

One of Alpert’s patients told him she couldn’t enjoy a vacation because anytime she saw Trump in the media, she felt triggered.

Alpert calls it a profound pathology. And he’s right. It’s the defining pathology of our time.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is a mass psychosis, a mass psychosis that has been manufactured using similar tactics to what you would expect from authoritarian regimes like communist China, North Korea or the former U.S.S.R.

This is the terrain of my book — and the results are in plain sight…

People aren’t simply opposed to Trump. They are obsessive. Clinically obsessive.

They absorb propaganda until it becomes part of their identity and then recoil from reality with the intensity of someone defending a cult.

Beware the Anxiety Machine

Trump Derangement Syndrome is only one expression of the larger psychological breakdown we’re living through. The same conditioning that drives people into obsession over Trump shows up everywhere else on the left.

Start with the basics…

The constant lies about men becoming women. And remember, that’s just the opening move. It’s the first step in the process.

Tell people to deny something obvious, force them to repeat it and, eventually, you condition them to accept any contradiction.

Then look at climate hysteria.

There are grown adults — not children, not teenagers, adults — who lose sleep because they’ve convinced themselves climate change is going to make humanity extinct.

That’s a real, documented phenomenon on the left. But think about what that means…

For instance, people refusing to have children because of what left-wing propaganda has done to their minds.

People who sincerely believe there is a “genocide” against trans people because we don’t think a 200-pound bearded man should be competing in girls’ athletics.

That which was once on the fringe has now become the left’s mainstream opinion.

And of course, COVID fits right into this: The madness of Fauci-ism was never just about public health.

It was about Pavlovian-style social conditioning.

The idea is simple. Create a stimulus, attach an emotional reaction, repeat until the reaction becomes automatic and bypasses the rational mind entirely.

That’s why the reality of anti-Trumpism is what it is today — absurdity on a loop.

• The Russia-collusion hoax

• The endless prosecutions

• The Epstein insinuations.

• The constant, coordinated lies.

For people rooted in reality like you and me, we haven’t handed over our brains to the system. You’re part of Money & Power precisely because you still trust your five senses! As well as your gut.

But ask yourself this:

How many people you know — especially in big blue states, people who voted for Kamala Harris — believe things that are flatly impossible?

How many talking points are repeated that make no sense?

How many become enraged when you question the narrative?

How many behave like they’ve been absorbed into a cult?

That’s what happens when a political movement trains millions to surrender their judgment and react emotionally on command.

Recognizing the Pattern

Once you understand what’s happening, the scheme becomes impossible to miss.

Manufactured delusion doesn’t rely on persuasion. It relies on process — the same process you see in every society that tries to control how people think, not just what they think.

It starts with constant emotional pressure: fear, outrage, shame, moral panic. Keep people in a heightened state of emergency and their rational defenses weaken.

Then comes isolation. Not necessarily locking people in their homes, but walling them off from honest dissent.

Next, you elevate certain narratives until they feel morally mandatory. Good people believe [fill in the blank with leftist ideology]. Bad people question it.

Then you punish doubt. You don’t have to arrest anyone, you just make skepticism costly. People learn to self-censor long before anyone has to silence them.

Once a person believes the sky is yellow instead of blue, power trippers can do the real work of rewriting his worldview from the inside out.

At that point, you don’t need to win arguments. You just need to keep reinforcing the script.

That’s when you can tell someone there is no mountain, and they’ll defend that narrative to the death, even when they’re standing at its base.

You can tell them men can become women, and they’ll treat skepticism as a moral failure.

You can tell them the climate will destroy humanity in ten-years time, and they’ll rearrange their lives accordingly.

If you don’t understand how that disconnection from reality happens, you can’t arm yourself — or the people you care about — against the same process.

The Fight for Your Perception

Everything I’ve described follows a predictable pattern. I recognized that pattern years ago because I’ve seen versions of it up close.

When you spend time inside the intelligence community, you learn quickly how fragile perception is.

You learn how easily a narrative can be constructed, how rapidly an entire population can be steered and how dangerous it becomes when the people shaping those narratives stop caring about the truth.

I’ve seen what happens to countries when their citizens lose the ability to distinguish reality from manufactured emotion.

It never ends well. And for the first time in my life, I’m watching that same process unfold here in the U.S.

So, I wrote Manufacturing Delusion as both a warning and a manual.

It took two years to write — in part, because it had to go through the same clearance process that every former intelligence officer faces.

There were details I’ve never spoken about publicly before; I was determined to handle them responsibly.

And what you’ll find in my book isn’t available anywhere else.

We’re now living in a country where millions have been conditioned to doubt what they can clearly observe. They don’t arrive at that point alone. They’re guided there, pushed there, conditioned there.

If you want to understand how that happens, why it works and how to protect yourself from the same machinery, that’s exactly what this book is for.

Manufacturing Delusion comes out February 17, 2026.

And I’ll be blunt… Preorders matter.

They determine how widely this book is distributed, how seriously publishers and retailers take its message and how much reach it’ll have when the country enters the most turbulent political year of our lifetimes.

If you want this information in the hands of people who need it — and if you want your own copy guaranteed when it launches — you can click this link to preorder now.

This is the moment when clarity becomes a survival skill.

Because once you learn how the delusion is built, something important happens…

No one can ever convince you the Rockies aren’t there.

You may stand on the flat plains, but you’ll know exactly what’s on the horizon.

And you’ll never mistake a manufactured narrative for the landscape right in front of you.

The murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina, in August 2025 drew national attention because of the random brutality caught on camera.  But beyond that, it brought into question the ongoing decline of America’s prosecution and punishment policies, especially within Democrat controlled cities.

The trend within progressive enclaves is to reduce prosecutions in order to reduce crime stats.  Far-left district attorneys and judges also have a habit of cutting deals with repeat offenders in order to keep the prison system from being “overwhelmed.”   Often, they use the excuse that suspects require mental health services rather than long prison sentences.

Violent assailants are set loose on the unsuspecting public over and over again. 

  

The Iryna Zarutska murder suspect, Decarlos Brown Jr., is a repeat offender with a history of 14 arrests including  armed robbery and assault.  He was released without bond months earlier.  The reason?  Brown was initially diagnosed with schizophrenia.  But doesn’t this mean he should have been locked up for good instead of being released over and over again?  

The notion of “rehabilitation” for such offenders is a fantasy.  Numerous psychological studies have failed to produce even the slightest change in the recidivism rate for violent criminals.  Though politically unsavory, the fact is that high recidivism rates are the historical norm and have never substantively declined. Criminal behaviors are habituated and manifest from early callous and unemotional traits in childhood that seamlessly unfold into antisocial personality dysfunction throughout adulthood.

A Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) study between 2008 and 2018 found that 66% of people released from prison in 24 states in were re-arrested within three years.  Of those re-arrested, 48% had an arrest that led to a conviction, and 49% returned to prison.  A review of 110 homicide suspects found that 82% had serious prior criminal convictions, 59% had a prior weapons offense, and 44% had prior violent crime convictions.

Multiple studies from countries around the world indicate that 1% of repeat offenders are responsible for over 60% of all violent crime and convictions. 

Under progressive policies, these criminals enjoy consistent protection from long term imprisonment.  Arguments include the claim that criminals are a “product of their environment” and that American society is to blame, not the perpetrators.  Leftists also assert that rehabilitation is superior to incarceration and that most criminals are “not bad people”, they simply face mental health obstacles. 

None of this is accurate.  Instead, leftist judges and politicians have created an system in which psychopathic offenders of certain demographics receive special treatment in the name of “equity” despite the risk they present to the general public.  Beyond that, leftists want to deconstruct the prison system, not expand it, because they view it as an “oppressive mechanism” of white supremacy.

The passage of Iryna’s Law in North Carolina is triggering a panic among Democrat officials who claim that requiring a bond for repeat offenders is going to pack their prisons; the very prisons they would prefer to defund.   

NC officials: “We are bracing for Monday, as you do when there’s a hurricane or a tragic storm that is coming.”

The new Iryna’s law will require violent criminals to be jailed instead of being released on the streets. pic.twitter.com/YD0xY9sH86

— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) November 28, 2025

Critics also worry that harsher penalties for repeat offenders will open the door to the return of the death penalty. The bill passed the state House of Representatives 82-30 and the state Senate 28-8. Initially a bipartisan effort, 10 Democrats crossed party lines to vote with Republicans in the House. No Democrats voted for passage in the Senate.

Its main provisions enforce stricter pre-trial release conditions, mandate mental health evaluations for some defendants and expedite the process for implementing capital punishment. The death penalty changes were a last-minute amendment introduced by Phil Berger (R), president pro tempore of the state Senate, which caused Democrats to walk out. 

The statute virtually eliminates cashless bail for “violent offenses” and certain repeat offenders, as well as expanding the definition of “violent offenses.” For all offenses, it completely removes the condition to release a defendant on a written promise to appear.

In other words, common sense crime reform which should be the standard across the US.  Liberal crime theory has been an abject failure.  Rather than targeting the primary source of violent crime (repeat offenders) and locking them away for good, Democrats have chosen to hide stats by reducing prosecutions and convictions behind the facade of a mental health crusade.  Where they have failed in protecting the public, Iryna’s Law is likely to succeed.

Authored by George Ford Smith via The Mises Institute,

There’s an argument running through the commentariat that goes something like this: AI (artificial intelligence) has already rendered some jobs obsolete and will continue this trend until the human race is unemployed. Even now it surpasses the ability of most people to write an effective opinion essay because it can create logic-driven, elegant compositions in seconds. Since government schools turn out illiterates, people will depend on AI commentaries for intellectual expression. Combined with research functions that are allegedly dependent on flawed databases, leading users to accept falsehoods in areas such as medicine, government, and economic theory, it renders them easy prey for a program of complete statism, such as socialism.

Why socialism? Because socialists promise to care for the downtrodden, which will be every person left alive when AI achieves full robustness.

AI in the hands of a socialist government will feed and house them, and will, of course, see that it’s done equitably. This leaves libertarians and conservatives with the urgent need to stop AI in its tracks now, while they still can.

The idea of AI overtaking humanity has a distinguished pedigree. The website PauseAI presents quotes from leaders in their fields about the dangers of runaway AI:

Physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking had warned that, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race… It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate.”

Elon Musk—who is developing his own AI called Grokipedia—said, “AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation than be reactive. I think that [digital super intelligence] is the single biggest existential crisis that we face and the most pressing one.”

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates thinks “Superintelligent AIs are in our future…. There’s the possibility that AIs will run out of control.”

The founder of computer science and artificial intelligence Alan Turning predicted,

It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said,

There’s a long tail of things of varying degrees of badness that could happen. I think at the extreme end is the Nick Bostrom style of fear that an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) could destroy humanity. I can’t see any reason in principle why that couldn’t happen.

The foregoing experts have IQs far beyond ordinary. But they’re also human, subject to error.

Inventions that shake up the world have always been feared.

According to Plato, the invention of writing “will implant forgetfulness in [men’s] souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.” As it happened, writing by hand can improve memory and learning, especially for children. And, in early America, Thomas Paine showed incredible recall as he hand-wrote detailed critiques while relying solely on his memory.

Calculators have been said to be another tool for the lazy. In fact, they were found to have “allowed learners to focus on problem-solving rather than mechanical calculations” while fostering confidence in their learning abilities.

While it is in some sense true that the internet has shortened attention spans, there is ample evidence to contradict the claim, such as Substack essays, multi-hour podcasts, and eBooks. If people are engaged in tasks meaningful to them, while working in a supportive environment that keeps dopamine distractions to a minimum they are fully capable of multi-hour focus.

People are not, therefore, inert automatons under control of subversive forces. As Bastiat wrote about in The Law, in which he defined socialism as the improper use of force,

When law and force keep a person within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing but a mere negation. They oblige him only to abstain from harming others. . . . But when the law, by means of its necessary agent, force, imposes upon men a regulation of labor, a method or a subject of education, a religious faith or creed—then the law is no longer negative; it acts positively upon people. It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own wills; the initiative of the legislator for their own initiatives.

There is nothing in AI or AGI that requires the imposition of force. But socialism and its variants do. Socialism as an economic and sociological theory was thoroughly debunked by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 and again in 1922. As Mises argued in his 1920 essay, socialism suffers from the fatal absence of market pricing in producer goods. Even the best-selling socialist author Robert Heilbroner admitted in 1990, “It turns out, of course, that Mises was right. The Soviet system has long been dogged by a method of pricing that produced grotesque misallocations of effort.”

The only purpose of an economy is to create goods and services that satisfy human wants, not to create jobs. If AI eliminates jobs in the sense we now understand it, other opportunities will emerge for value creation as they have before when new technologies upset the status quo. Human wants are unlimited, and theory and history have shown that a market free from state intervention is the best way to satisfy them.

A recent poll shows more college students favor socialism than capitalism. This is hardly surprising given the socialist orientation of universities and their misrepresentation of capitalism. As Mises wrote in Socialism, “The terms ‘Capitalism’ and ‘Capitalistic Production’ are political catchwords. They were invented by socialists, not to extend knowledge, but to carp, to criticize, to condemn.”

The economic system that has sent students—graduating with four-year degrees, saddled with mountains of debt, and few marketable skills—is the Federal Reserve, income tax, warmongering, interventionist big government monstrosity.

This is a gross perversion of capitalism.

Multiple people were taken into custody by the NYPD during a protest in Chinatown Saturday afternoon after protesters gathered outside a parking garage at Centre Street and Howard Street where ICE agents were reportedly stationed in preparation for an immigration raid.  As with many of these incidents across the country in recent months, activists were somehow tipped off to the location of the ICE rally point.

Chaos and violence ensued as protesters blocked government vehicles (which is illegal), obstructed roadways (also illegal), threw items into the road to create obstacles (very illegal) and damaged public and private property (about as far from legal protest as it gets).  The NYPD was called by residents reporting the blocked streets and was not there specifically to aid ICE.  

The coordination of these groups is rather complex (not grassroots) and is handled by NGOs running call centers (rapid response hotlines).  These centers collect information from anonymous sources and then send out activists for on the ground verification.  Trained activists are then notified by phone or by text of an ICE location in their area. 

The protesters are paid, often by stipend or reimbursement, allowing low wage or jobless people to work as a mob for hire. 

There are a number of NGOs that run these operations in the NY area, but the largest is “Make The Road New York”, a group which is often cited for its involvement in anti-ICE actions.  MRNY receives tens-of-millions of dollars in funding from globalist NGOs like the Ford Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.  They have also collected government grants in the past and have worked closely with Democrat Politicians like former NY Mayor Bill de Blasio.

As we saw in the North Carolina ICE raids, NGO funded networks run training seminars for activists, teaching them methods for obstruction and provocation.  Again, there is nothing “grassroots” about these organizations.  Without funding for ultra-wealthy international non-profits, most of these protest would probably not exist. 

  

Then, of course, there’s the lack of any real deterrent to their tactics.  Local police make minimal arrests despite the endless criminal violations.  Riot police are rarely deployed and riot tactics are avoided; this puts the police at risk while enabling the paid protesters.  A little CS spray would go a long way in dispersing these mobs, but they seem to be protected from serious repercussions and ICE is limited in their manpower.

These provocations may simply be designed to force the Trump Administration’s hand, requiring Trump to deploy the national guard.  This then allows the leftist media and Democrat politicians to accuse Trump of “authoritarianism”.  At some point, the optics need to take a back seat to practicality.

The majority (66%) of Americans support deportations for illegal immigrants and the public voted for Trump based in large part on his promises to reverse the immigration disaster created by Joe Biden and the Democrats.  NGO funded activism is a direct violation of the will of the voters and eventually, it will have to be dealt with at the source.  

Authored by Jennifer Cowan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Sexual extortion of children for profit is on the rise, Canada’s financial intelligence agency says, and a large portion of such activities are tied to organized crime.

This form of online coercion consists of threats to share sexual images or videos of a victim unless they provide the offenders with money or additional pictures, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) says in a newly published operational alert.

The federal agency released the alert this week as part of its efforts to combat the online sexual exploitation of children.

“Online child sexual exploitation is a disturbing global crime targeting children that continues to rise year after year, not only in the number of confirmed reports showing child sexual abuse images, but also in the severity of the images and videos,” Fintrac said in a press release.

“The motivation for sexually exploiting children varies, and while most perpetrators commit child sexual exploitation for sexual gratification and not financial gain, there has been an increase in financially motivated offending, including sexual extortion cases in recent years.”

FINTRAC described the 11-page report as a way to help businesses identify and report financial transactions associated with such crimes and is urging banks and businesses to be on the lookout for the patterns identified in the report that can point to extortion or other types of child sexual exploitation.

The updated alert is based on strategic intelligence released by the agency in December 2020, and it integrates lessons learned about such crimes since then.

Victims Blackmailed

FINTRAC’s investigation into transactions linked to online child sexual exploitation showed that nearly all suspected offenders were male. They occupied various professions or referred to themselves as retired, with the majority ranging in age from their late 20s to 60s.

There has also been an increase in online purchases of child sexual exploitation material using virtual currencies, typically by men in their late 20s to 30s, the agency said.

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection has reported that perpetrators often use social media platforms to impersonate a young person so they can establish a connection and lure the victim into sending a nude image or video,  the alert says. The offender will then blackmail the youth after receiving the photo or video, demanding money or items such as gift cards, or further images, in exchange for not distributing the content to family and friends or making it public.

Demands for money have been known to come from international organized criminal networks, FINTRAC said, citing sources consulted by Cybertip, a national tip line for reporting online sexual abuse of children.

“Cybertip further highlights that boys are often targets of financial sexual extortion, while girls are more often extorted for more images,” the alert said.

FINTRAC outlined a range of indicators that could suggest online child exploitation. Sexual extortion may involve the rapid depletion of an account through email money transfers, online gift card acquisitions, or funds transferred to peer-to-peer payment platforms, it said.

Some transaction notes have been known to contain references that the funds are being extorted from the senders, including mentions of explicit content or desperate phrases like “please stop” or “delete the video.”

Some countries attract sex offenders because of their economic conditions, insufficient laws to safeguard vulnerable individuals, or their relative proximity to Canada, the FINTRAC alert said. The jurisdictions identified as high-risk are the Philippines, Thailand, India, South Africa, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Cuba.

FINTRAC was founded in 2000 and began operations as Canada’s national financial intelligence agency and anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing regulator shortly after, becoming fully operational in 2001.

It looks for funds associated with money laundering by examining millions of data points annually from banks, insurance firms, securities traders, money service providers, real estate brokers, casinos, and various other entities. The agency then passes on the intelligence it gathers to the RCMP and other police services and security partners.

The Canadian Press contributed to this report.

China’s top economic-planning body, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), issued a rare warning earlier today about the emergence of bubble conditions in the country’s humanoid robotics industry. This warning comes just as Elon Musk is planning to scale production of the Tesla Optimus robot next year. 

Bloomberg cites comments from NDRC spokeswoman Li Chao, who warned that more than 150 companies and startups are developing nearly identical robots, creating the risk of a classic investment bubble that could trigger a bust cycle and stifle real innovation.

“Frontier industries have long grappled with the challenge of balancing the speed of growth against the risk of bubbles, an issue now confronting the humanoid robot sector as well,” Li warned. 

Humanoid robotics has exploded in popularity since Unitree’s robot dog with a flamethrower attachment. We’ve purchased one from an importer (minus flamethrower attachment) to see what all the excitement is about…

Taking a look at the Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index –  a thematic equity index tracking Chinese companies involved in the commercialization of humanoid and robotics technologies –  is up 28.5% year to date and doubled from 2024 lows. 

Related: 

• Goldman Finds “Inflection Point” With Humanoid Robots; We Tested Unitree’s Robodog

• Goldman’s Chat With Top Robotics Firm Reveals Skynet Humanoid Timeline

• China Humanoid Robotics Index Jumps After Unitree Debuts “Stellar Hunter”

Latest reports:

• Humanoid Robot Roundup: Tesla Kicks Off Optimus Pilot Production As Goldman Tours China’s Supply Chain

• Humanoid Robot Roundup: Auto Industry Poised To Lead First Wave Of Adoption

Citi forecasts the humanoid robot industry could reach $7 trillion by 2050, although mass adoption remains a 2030s story. 

Authored by Richard Menger via The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER),

Since the enactment of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), health insurance premiums have steadily increased, as has healthcare’s proportion of the gross domestic product (GDP). In employer-sponsored insurance, escalating premiums are the primary driver for stagnant take-home wages.

The structure of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and employer-sponsored insurance conceal the true cost of healthcare. The recent government shutdown exposed this underlying flaw to public scrutiny.

Should the premium tax credits lapse as expected, the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) projects that premiums for Americans will increase by more than 75 percent. This stark price increase will now confront consumers, leaving patients worried and dissatisfied.

Both the ACA and employer-sponsored healthcare obscure actual healthcare costs, promoting moral hazard and distorting economic incentives.

Unraveling the Mechanics of ACA Premium Subsidies

The ACA in 2010 established premium tax credits (PTCs) to enhance the affordability of health insurance through Marketplace exchanges. These refundable credits, authorized under IRC Section 36B, reduce premiums for households with modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) at or above 100 percent of the federal poverty level ($15,650 for an individual in 2025). In 2021, enhancements increased credit amounts for existing eligible participants and extended eligibility to those exceeding 400 percent of the federal poverty level. The 2023 resolution of the “family glitch” enables dependents to access PTCs when family coverage is deemed unaffordable.

Absent congressional intervention, enhanced subsidies will expire in 2025, potentially doubling premiums and disenrolling millions, thus undermining the coverage gains championed by ACA advocates. Estimates suggest that without renewal, enrollees would face an average premium increase of $1,016 on the marketplace. The expiration of enhanced PTCs is projected to escalate annual premium costs for subsidized enrollees by 114 percent, rising from an average of $888 in 2025 to $1,904 in 2026.

In essence, the collapse of this support structure threatens the stability of the ACA’s framework. The house of cards comes crashing down.

The Hidden Challenge With Employer-Based Coverage

A Kaiser Family Foundation survey revealed that the average premium for employer-sponsored family coverage increased by 26 percent from 2020 to 2025. In 2024, the average annual cost for single coverage was $8,951, with employees typically contributing $1,368, while family coverage averaged $25,572, with employees paying $6,296.

A recent Mercer survey reported that employers expect a 6.5 percent rise in employee healthcare costs for 2026, the largest increase since 2010. Likewise, a Business Group on Health poll indicated employers anticipate a 7.6 percent surge in healthcare expenses in 2026, the most significant jump in over a decade.

Employees often remain unaware of true healthcare costs, as their contributions are partially offset by tax-advantaged employer benefits. However, these costs indirectly suppress wage growth. Meanwhile, healthcare inflation consistently outpaces general wage increases.

Conversely, insurance companies are thriving.

Since the ACA’s passage, the top five health insurers’ annual profits have soared by 230 percent. In 2024, UnitedHealth’s CEO earned $26.3 million, Cigna’s CEO $23.2 million, and others followed suit.

This dynamic does not reflect true capitalism or free-market principles but rather crony capitalism bolstered by government subsidies.

The Core Economic Problem

Imagine a pizza system mirroring healthcare. Employers subsidize 80 percent of a Supreme Pizza plan for employees, lowering the visible cost per slice to $2, though the true price is $10. Uninformed consumers add extravagant toppings—pineapple, anchovies, glitter sprinkles—perceiving them as nearly free. With numerous pizza varieties available, consumption surges. Moral hazard drives daily orders, even for breakfast pizza, escalating demand. Pizzerias, aware of this price ignorance, promote lavish new combinations. An ACA-style “PizzaCare” program caps costs at a fraction of income, encouraging excessive consumption without consideration. Prices skyrocket, benefiting pizza companies. Government subsidies intensify this distortion, further inflating costs. Employees relish their pizza; it becomes part of their daily or weekly routine. They are unaware of its true cost, but may notice and object if their pizza price component rises from $2 to $2.50 or $3.

Hayek’s Warnings and the Dependency Trap

Notably, Marketplace enrollment doubled from 11 million to 24 million following the introduction of enhanced premium tax credits in 2021.

This is Hayek’s cautionary narrative.

The critical issue lies in the vulnerability of ordinary individuals, distracted by whether Notre Dame will secure a College Football Playoff berth, the Islanders will win the Stanley Cup, or their seven-year-old will score in Saturday’s soccer game. These individuals face significant financial strain, having grown reliant on subsidies to afford healthcare. The broader healthcare system similarly depends on government support, embodying Hayek’s warning of diminishing personal autonomy and deepening entanglement with state intervention.

In “The Road to Serfdom,” Friedrich Hayek vividly depicts government overreach as a frog slowly boiling in a pot, lulled by promises of security. The ACA’s subsidies, like a siren call, have enticed 24.2 million enrollees with affordable premiums, obscuring the escalating true cost of healthcare. Once established, these subsidies become indispensable, with millions now dependent on them, as evidenced by projected premium spikes.

Should the enhanced subsidies, originally temporary, expire as planned in 2025, the resulting premium surge reveals the trap: dependence on state generosity. As Hayek cautioned, this reliance, cloaked in equity and justice, erodes freedom, empowering a bureaucracy to dictate government-directed winners and losers.

Once entrenched, dismantling programs initially deemed temporary becomes politically toxic. Individuals adapt to a subsidized reality, viewing affordable premiums as essential, mirroring Hayek’s portrayal of populations bound to state largesse. The ACA’s framework, with 24.2 million enrollees dependent on credits, fosters a cycle of deepening reliance. Any rollback, such as the looming 2025 expiration, risks economic disruption, entrenching a system where insurers profit from inflated costs while patients, shielded from true price signals, remain tethered to subsidies.

This validates Hayek’s thesis: centralized interventions breed dependency, eroding choice and fueling a gradual descent into serfdom.

A new study shows tattoo ink drains into the lymphatic system and accumulates in lymph nodes, diminishing the effects of immune cells. This accumulation of ink pigment triggers both local and systemic inflammation that persists for months.

A third of American adults, roughly 32% – or about 80 million people – have tattoos, and they should read this new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

“Despite safety concerns regarding the toxicity of tattoo ink, no studies have reported the consequences of tattooing on the immune response. In this work, we have characterized the transport and accumulation of different tattoo inks in the lymphatic system using a murine model,” researcher Arianna Capucetti wrote in the study.

Capucetti continued:

Upon quick lymphatic drainage, we observed that macrophages mainly capture the ink in the lymph node (LN).

An initial inflammatory reaction at local and systemic levels follows ink capture. Notably, the inflammatory process is maintained over time, as we observed clear signs of inflammation in the draining LN 2 mo following tattooing. In addition, the capture of ink by macrophages was associated with the induction of apoptosis in both human and murine models. Furthermore, the ink accumulated in the LN altered the immune response against two different types of vaccines.

On the one hand, we observed a reduced antibody response following vaccination with a messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA)-based severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccine, which was associated with a decreased expression of the spike protein in macrophages in the draining LN.

In contrast, we observed an enhanced response when vaccinated with influenza vaccine inactivated by ultraviolet (UV) radiation.

Considering the unstoppable trend of tattooing in the population, our results are crucial in informing the toxicology programs, policymakers, and the general public regarding the potential risk of the tattooing practice associated with an altered immune response.

As we noted earlier this year, “Many tattoo inks contain chemicals that have been classified as carcinogenic — or cancer-causing — by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.”

While black tattoo inks use carbon black, colored inks contain pigments designed for industrial applications such as plastics and paints. More troubling, tattoo inks are far less regulated than pharmaceuticals.

We have already covered two important studies:

• A 2024 Swedish study tracking nearly 12,000 people found that individuals with tattoos had a 21% higher risk of malignant lymphoma compared with those without ink.

• A Danish twin study published earlier this year reported similar trends. Tattooed participants showed higher rates of skin cancer.

Dr. Trisha Khanna, dermatologist and medical advisory board member at Codex Labs, recently told The Epoch Times, “Current regulations on tattoo ink ingredients are not sufficient,” adding, “This is a growing concern among dermatologists.”

And laser removal could make it worse.