Category: simonblack

The government has shut down, and now the CDC has suspended “nonessential” functions, like providing guidance on HIV prevention.

Yesterday, America understood that condoms prevent STDs. Today— who could say? The government is shut down. We are all lost.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics won’t be able to release its monthly jobs report— which has been wildly inaccurate for the past several years.

I guess the public will just have to settle for the ADP report instead. You know, the one from the private payroll company that actually processes paychecks for over 25 million workers — real data, from real businesses — and somehow manages to release its numbers on time, without spending a dime of taxpayer dollars.

The Commerce Department is furloughing tens of thousands of employees. Which means… well, what exactly does that mean? Does anyone actually know what the Commerce Department even does?

The Census Bureau is shut down too. No more “community outreach” programs registering illegal immigrants to vote.

Of course I am just cherry-picking the most unnecessary functions of government.

What we should all really be concerned about is going without a functioning military—

Oh wait, the military continues to function during a government shutdown.

But there will be sacrifices. The Defense Department has paused elective surgeries — which I assume means Navy sailors will have to reschedule their sex-change operations.

But I imagine with the government shut down, airplanes will begin to fall out of the sky—

Oh, Air Traffic Controllers still work. The TSA still functions, which might not make air travel safer, but will continue to prevent you from bringing water on a flight.

But the government is totally shut down.

Well, not the National Parks, which collect some of their own revenue, or the Smithsonian which had plenty of budget leftover to continue operating.

It’s a super serious shutdown though.

Well, FEMA will continue to operate— which I guess means continuing to ignore areas hit by storms.

And Social Security checks will still go out. You can still renew your passport.

No, they didn’t pause SNAP or safety net programs. Pell Grants are not paused. ICE is still on the hunt.

It’s being extremely generous to even claim all the things which are still functioning during this “shutdown” are “essential.”

And the Trump administration seems to have come to the same conclusion, which is why they are maneuvering to make many of these layoffs permanent, perhaps shutting down entire non-essential departments and offices.

Because it turns out that, aside from a few bureaucratic inconveniences, the world doesn’t end when a bloated, inefficient, overreaching government takes a breather.

Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that government shutdowns in general are not a good look when it comes to instilling confidence in the government.

We wrote Monday that the dysfunction in American politics will only further spur foreign governments and central banks to dump their dollars and replace them with gold.

But if Trump can do anything to redeem the US, it is pulling a DOGE in one fell swoop, and hitting the delete button on all unnecessary government programs.

That would show the world that the US recognizes its financial problems, and is taking steps in the right direction to balance the budget, and reduce it’s debt load.

This is the kind of mentality we need.

Annnnd, he’s being sued.

You’d think the President, who runs the Executive Branch, could fire people in the Executive Branch. But no. Every action is dragged into court, usually before some activist federal judge with a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Cue the injunctions. Red tape. Back pay.

As if a government job is a God-given right.

There is no greater entitlement mindset in America today than that of a federal employee who declares, “From my cold, dead hands… you’ll take my position in the Department of Commerce!”

And if you want to talk about losing confidence, just imagine being a foreign central banker watching this circus unfold— an executive legally prevented from executing.

That’s exactly the kind of thing that makes them throw up their hands— forget it!

They’ll just keep buying gold, dumping Treasuries, and get out while they still can.

PS– Gold just hit $3,900 on news the government shut down.

Gold has been going through the roof, but many top quality gold miners have lagged far behind. That is starting to change, but there is still opportunity before the gap closes.

Click here to learn more about the undervalued precious medals producers we have found for subscribers of The 4th Pillar investment research newsletter— we’re currently offering a limited time discount.

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All eyes are on Washington to see if the government shuts down when the clock strikes midnight tonight.

Funny thing is, most people aren’t really going to care—because all of the “essential” services will keep running. (Which makes you wonder: why do non-essential government services exist on the taxpayer’s dime in the first place?)

But today is also the end of the fiscal year. And based on the data, we can see that the US will end the fiscal year with around $37.5 trillion in debt. That means, for Fiscal Year 2025, the debt will have increased by another $1.8 trillion.

Taken as a whole, this is an obvious testament to why foreign governments and central banks are rapidly losing confidence in the US government.

It doesn’t even matter whether the government shuts down tonight— it is the fact that it always comes so close. That Congress can’t even manage to pass a basic budget.

And the “solution” on the table is just another short-term patch— a continuing resolution that keeps the government funded for less than two months, until November 21st.

America looks like exactly what it is: a dysfunctional government that can’t even pass a budget.

Frankly, it’s embarrassing.

On top of that, you’ve got this $37.5 trillion debt growing by leaps and bounds—faster than the US economy and faster than tax revenue.

At a certain point, these foreign governments and central banks, who collectively own trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of US government bonds, start wondering: why should I continue to own these securities? Why continue to lend money to the US government?

They can’t even pass a routine budget, let alone the kind of budget that would actually reassure foreign governments and central banks—a truly controversial one that makes deep, necessary cuts to runaway spending.

Then there’s another problem—one that isn’t new. It started under the Bush administration, Obama elevated it, and Biden perfected it: the weaponization of the US dollar, the financial system, and US Treasury bonds.

This gives foreign governments and central banks obvious concern: if they do something the US doesn’t like, they’re going to be frozen out of the dollar system—out of their Treasury holdings, and out of dollar-denominated assets altogether.

And these are all reasons why we believe, over the long run, gold will continue to march higher: central banks will continue to buy gold as an alternative to US dollars.

Why gold?

It’s an independent asset. It’s not controlled by any government. No country is worried that America will freeze its gold holdings. Millions of troy ounces of bars and bullion stored around the world can’t be frozen with the click of a button.

Gold is universally accepted by every other country and central bank. There’s a global market for it. And it’s an asset class large enough to absorb billions of dollars— or even tens, or hundreds of billions—over time.

You can’t say that about most other asset classes.

Gold has already had an astonishing run—especially this year. But we think that, over the long run, as more foreign central banks allocate an increasing percentage of their strategic reserves into gold instead of dollars, that excess demand will continue to push the gold price much higher.

Gold is like anything else—subject to the laws of supply and demand. Demand for physical gold by governments and central banks around the world has been very strong.

And based on the data we’re seeing, that continues to be the case.

The Chinese central bank has bought another 21 tons of gold this year, marking ten consecutive months of purchases.

And it’s not just China. It’s all over the world— Poland, Turkey, Czech Republic, Kazakhstan and many other countries are buying literal tons of gold.

In fact, 95% of central bank reserve managers said they expect global official gold holdings to increase over the next 12 months, according to the 2025 World Gold Council Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey.

There are, however, short-term price risks. For example, the gold price is also impacted by demand for jewelry, as well as industrial use.

Given current record-high prices, jewelry demand is much weaker.

And that can have an adverse impact on gold prices.

Another factor to consider is supply. At a certain point, mining companies are going to take advantage of these high prices and ratchet up production, eventually resulting in oversupply in the market. That, too, could weigh on gold prices.

But we think these are shorter-term factors that don’t change anything about the long-term driver of gold prices—and that is central bank demand.

What we are seeing literally today— government shutdowns and $1.8 trillion deficits—just underscores how widespread that central bank demand is—and why it simply isn’t going away.

PS: While gold has hit all time highs, the share prices of many top quality gold producers has lagged far behind. That is starting to change, but there is still opportunity before the gap closes.

Click here to learn more about the undervalued precious medals producers we have found for subscribers of The 4th Pillar investment research newsletter—we’re currently offering a limited time discount.

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In the election of 1800, journalist James Callender once described presidential candidate (and then Vice President) John Adams as “a hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

Adams’ opponent, Thomas Jefferson, was likewise smeared as “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father,” and accused of being a Jacobin who would confiscate Bibles and burn churches.

The ideological divide— even from America’s earliest era— was so bad that each side thought the other would bring an end to the Republic.

It didn’t get any better. By 1804, following years of political rivalry and personal animosity, sitting Vice President Aaron Burr shot and killed former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel on the banks of the Hudson River.

The 1828 election between Andrew Jackson versus John Quincy Adams became one of the ugliest presidential elections in American history.

Jackson’s campaign came out with the original “Russia-gate”— accusing Adams of procuring an American girl to serve the Russian czar’s sexual pleasure while serving as US minister to Russia. Adams was called a “pimp” in public handbills and editorials.

Adams’s allies, meanwhile, painted Jackson as a bloodthirsty brute— a “murderer” and unhinged military tyrant who unlawfully executed soldiers. They also attacked Jackson’s wife Rachel, calling her a “convicted adulteress” and publicly accusing the couple of bigamy.

Rachel died shortly after the election, and Jackson blamed her death on the slanders she endured.

Then, of course, there was that little kerfuffle known as the Civil War.

In the aftermath, thousands of black citizens were beaten, lynched, or shot for attempting to exercise their newly acquired voting rights. White supremacist militias operated as unofficial enforcers of the Democratic Party, openly intimidating black citizens and Republican candidates.

Marcus “Brick” Pomeroy, editor of the La Crosse Democrat, described Abraham Lincoln as the worst tyrant “since the days of Nero.” He wrote, “we trust some bold hand will pierce his heart with dagger point for the public good.”

Less than a year later, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated…. which sort of set off a trend; President James Garfield was gunned down in a train station sixteen years later.

By the turn of the 20th century, the instigators of political violence shifted from Southern lynch mobs to urban anarchists… and the tools of their terror shifted from burning crosses to bombs.

In 1901, President William McKinley was assassinated by anarchist Leon Czolgosz while shaking hands with the public at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo.

McKinley had been elected with the support of industrial interests, and critics called him a corporate puppet. Anarcho-communists cheered his shooting.

In 1908, a homemade bomb ripped through Union Square in New York during a political rally. In 1910, a suitcase bomb exploded at the Los Angeles Times building, killing 21 people — planted by union-affiliated anarchists targeting what they saw as capitalist propaganda.

Mail bombs were also routinely sent to prominent businessmen, plus judges and politicians.

Senator Thomas Hardwick of Georgia, a key architect of immigration reform that banned anarchists from entering the US, received a mail bomb at his home in April 1919; the senator was unharmed, but his maid lost both of her hands in the blast.

When Theodore Roosevelt returned to politics in 1912, his enemies labeled him everything at once: a fascist, a communist, a tyrant, a radical. In a single month, editorials warned that Roosevelt would “abolish property,” “install a dictatorship,” and “turn Washington into a labor camp.”

In 1919, anarchists coordinated near-simultaneous bombings in eight cities, including a blast that tore apart the Attorney General’s home in Washington.

The chaos finally calmed down during the Great Depression; after decades of bombings, lynchings, and assassinations, Americans were too broke— and too tired— to riot.

Then World War II redirected the nation’s rage outward. Then came the Cold War and the specter of thermonuclear war.

At home—aside from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s brief reign of terror in the 1950s—politics finally took on a strangely polite tone.

The Nixon-Kennedy debate in 1960 almost surreal by  today’s standards: two men calmly debating Medicare and foreign policy devoid of any insults or personal attacks. It was just a clean, orderly exchange of ideas.

This peace between America’s ideological opposites did not last long.

Kennedy was shot in the head in 1963. MLK was assassinated in Memphis five years later. Two months after that, Robert Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles.

Vietnam War protests tore through campuses. Cities burned. Students were shot by the National Guard.

Airplane hijackings were common in the 1970s, often by communist sympathizers who demanded to be flown to Cuba. Groups like the Black Liberation Army assassinated police officers, and the leftist Weather Underground bombed the US Capitol, Pentagon, and State Department.

Point is, when you look back objectively at the entire history of the United States, the periods of ‘calm’ stand out as the exception. Culture wars, chaos, ideological violence, corrupt media activism, etc. were pretty normal.

This historical context is important to keep in mind, because, right now, the culture wars feel like they are pulling the country apart at the seams. And they are.

But at the same time, this is nothing new. America has been pulled apart at the seams over and over again. Americans have fought over everything— from the structure of government to the existence of a central bank, from slavery to socialism, from Vietnam to Palestine.

Yet America always gets over it. Eventually the culture war ends, the conflict subsides… and at some point down the road, people start fighting over some other issue. It’s the way things have almost always been.

This time is not different. It’s louder, maybe. More constant. Algorithms spoon feed outrage into our daily lives. You can turn on a screen and watch it all melt down in real time.

But the underlying cycle of America’s ideological divide hasn’t changed. It is a pattern that is playing out again and will eventually get better. It always does.

Having said that, and, as important as these issues are— men in girls’ bathrooms, “Queers for Palestine”, etc., America’s real challenge isn’t cultural. It’s economic.

Irresponsible, runaway spending combined with an ever-expanding regulatory state that strangles the private economy, is an unprecedented challenge.

Unlike the nation’s deep ideological divide whose cycle has repeated over and over again throughout the last 250 years, America is in uncharted and dangerous territory when it comes to its $37+ trillion national debt.

The culture war and ideological divide will eventually heal. The economic challenge, on the other hand, will take serious work, tough decisions, and difficult sacrifices.

Sadly, none of that seems to be in the cards right now. And that’s setting the country up for some serious consequences down the road.

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It was more than 2,500 years ago in ancient Athens when democracy first took root. And the ancient Athenians quickly realized that if they wanted to have a cohesive society, they needed to ensure the utmost trust in their institutions and in their government.

This is why they developed a formal method to hold politicians and public officials accountable for their conduct.

Upon leaving office, every public official, from the highest magistrate to the lowliest market overseer to the most illustrious general, was required to submit detailed financial records within 30 days of their departure.

It was called euthyna. And it was an obvious check against financial corruption. Even the slightest discrepancy would be thoroughly investigated and potentially brought to trial.

This was no mere formality. Pericles himself, the golden-tongued statesman who guided Athens through its Golden Age, was hauled before the auditors and fined for misappropriating funds during the construction of the Parthenon.

But even beyond money, departing officials faced intense scrutiny over their actions and decisions while in office.

This wasn’t about holding officials to impossible standards. The Athenians understood that humans make mistakes. But they also understood the difference between an honest error and an inexcusable betrayal of the public trust.

After Athens’ naval victory at Arginusae in 406 BCE, for example, six generals who had failed to rescue survivors from storm-damaged ships faced public trial and were executed—not for losing a battle, but for failing in their duty to their men.

In ancient Athens there were real consequences for gross misconduct—fines, trials, even execution. And it worked.

It reduced petty corruption, laziness, and incompetence. The system wasn’t perfect, but Athens thrived.

How many of today’s public officials would survive that kind of scrutiny?

Modern America has no euthyna. There is no formal process to examine whether elected leaders actually did their jobs to the best of their abilities— with integrity, energy, and reason. There is no standard for holding them to account beyond, frankly, incompetent and easily-fooled voters.

Informally, however, the US was supposed to have an institution to shine light on the darkest corners of power: the press.

This is no accident; the Founding Fathers believed that a free press should act as a vital watchdog over the government.

Madison argued in Federalist No. 51 that the press was critical to “expose the maladministration of public affairs.”

But instead of scrutinizing government, today’s media is comprised of political activists masquerading as journalists. And rather than holding public officials accountable, they act as the de facto mouthpiece for the Far Left, complicit in rampant criminality and the destruction of American values.

Just weeks before the 2020 election they suppressed the very real Hunter Biden laptop story, falsely claiming it was Russian misinformation.

When citizen journalists took matters into their own hands on social media, those individuals were censored.

You might also recall when Twitter in 2021 (before Elon bought it) actually suspended the account of someone who was publishing Nancy Pelosi’s stock trades.

More recently, the mayor of Charlotte applauded the press for attempting (unsuccessfully) to bury to murder of Iryna Zarutska by a black man on a public train.

Meanwhile, on CNN, Van Jones worried that telling the truth about that brutal killing would make people oppose cashless bail policies and jump on “bandwagons”.

Rather than scrutinize those in power and report the facts honestly, the media kills stories, engineers narratives, doctors footage, and manipulates voters.

And in many respects, this is why James Comey needs to stand trial.

It’s not like there isn’t obvious cause; the former Director of the FBI was indicted for lying to Congress in relation to the “Russia-gate” hoax targeting Trump in his first term.

Comey said he hadn’t authorized a leak damaging to Trump’s public image, when in fact he had. And the evidence is pretty damning.

Comey knew the rules. He broke the rules. And he did it while serving as Director of the FBI—one of the top law enforcement officers in the country.

As the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. And while ALL public officials should be honest, we’re not talking about some mid-level bureaucrat at the Department of Agriculture.

Comey led 13,000+ special agents who make 70,000+ arrests per year. As head of the FBI, Comey’s integrity should be beyond reproach because it is a direct reflection of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency.

It’s the same reason why Lisa Cook should have been immediately suspended after allegations of mortgage fraud surfaced. As a Federal Reserve governor, any hint of financial impropriety, i.e. deceiving the very same banks that she is supposed to regulate for personal financial gain, is a direct affront to the Fed’s integrity.

Likewise, any hint of deceit from Comey’s (and there are a lot more than mere hints) is a direct affront to the integrity of the FBI.

The media refuses to cover this story. Rather, Comey was rewarded with a book deal and lucrative speaking gigs. Yet the public still deserves the truth. Voters should know if their leaders and institutions can be trusted.

People are whining that Comey’s prosecution is “politicized”. Duh. President Trump obviously directed his Attorney General to go after Comey.

But that doesn’t change the fundamental fact that there is overwhelming evidence that a senior-ranking public official in the United States did something deceitful and dirty. It’s not “politicized” if it’s true.

Comey dragged the entire country into a mess that, at minimum, weakened America’s standing abroad, to say nothing of the colossal waste of time and money, plus national security and election implications.

If he is truly innocent, then he should have nothing to fear. And I truly hope that justice is applied impartially.

But that doesn’t take away the need for scrutiny over someone in power. And in my view, Comey standing trial is modern euthyna. Finally. And I’d like to see more public officials, regardless of party, held to the same standard.

The country will be better off if politicians and bureaucrats are held accountable for corruption, deceit, negligence, and gross incompetence.

Given the media’s complicity, the legal system is the only remaining mechanism to shine light on the truth.

And the fact that it even needs to go to trial is a damning indictment of just how pathetic and derelict the American media has become.

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Gold just hit another all-time high this week, briefly touching $3,800 per ounce… which means it has more than doubled in the last two years.

When any asset continues hitting all-time highs, most people who haven’t bought it yet naturally believe that they missed out… or that they should wait for a pullback.

Of course, many people believed that when gold hit $2,400 in April of 2024… and then $2,800 early this year… and $3,400 in April.

As gold has continued its rise, however, we continued to suggest that this is still early days… and that the gold price could continue to surge much, much higher.

It’s not hard to understand why.

Foreign governments and central banks around the world are rapidly losing confidence in the US government… and by extension, in the US dollar.

The national debt is $37.5 trillion and rising. Deficits total $2 trillion each year, and there seems to be no appetite to cut spending. Worst of all, Congress can’t even manage to pass a budget… risking yet another government shutdown at the end of this month.

If that weren’t bad enough, the US federal government has also gotten in the habit of freezing assets of any foreign country that it doesn’t like.

At the moment, those same foreign governments (and foreign central banks) hold trillions worth of US dollar assets. So naturally any sensible foreign official is thinking about diversifying away from the US, and from the US dollar.

Unfortunately there simply aren’t too many options. No one trusts the Chinese Communist Party, so the yuan is out. Europe is its own economic basket case, so euro-denominated assets and European government bonds are not much better.

Out of the universe of options available, gold is one of the few assets that can solve this problem for foreign governments and central banks.

Gold isn’t controlled by any single government. No one can freeze them out of their gold or confiscate their holdings. Gold will hold its value against inflation. And the gold market is large enough that sovereign nations can purchase hundreds of billions of dollars worth.

This is why gold is at an all-time high: foreign governments and central banks have been buying it by the metric ton. And that extreme gold demand has pushed prices higher and higher.

We have been talking about this for 2+ years, since gold was below $2,000. And throughout gold’s rise, we kept saying that this trend will continue, i.e. foreign governments and central banks will buy more.

We still believe this is true, especially if you have a longer-term view over the next few years.

But we also presented an alternative to gold.

We wrote that the main demand driver for gold was from central banks. But central banks only buy physical gold. They do not buy gold stocks.

And we pointed out that while gold was at all time highs, the share prices of companies producing the gold were ridiculously.

In January, for example, one gold company we follow was trading at roughly 1x forward earnings.

And we practically screamed from the rooftops that this opportunity would not last— people would realize how undervalued these businesses were, while their revenue was literally denominated in gold at all time high prices.

Well, the gold companies’ earnings reports starting rolling in this year, and the market saw just how much money these companies were making.

Investors finally woke up. And by April, that same gold company had doubled its January share price— but was still only trading at about 2x earnings.

Gold kept ripping higher, and so did this company’s profits— after all, the cost to mine gold didn’t increase, and this company was still pulling it out of the ground for about $1,000 an ounce.

So its profit margin went from $800 per ounce two years ago, over $2,500 per ounce today.

Production costs have been flat. But their revenue per ounce has soared, up 50% this year alone.

Now, it’s share price has doubled again— 4x higher than in January.

And next month it will release Q3 results, a period it could sell gold as high as $3,700 per ounce. Its profits could be simply ridiculous.

Here’s the crazy part: even though the share price has quadrupled this year, the company is making so much money that it is STILL only trading for 2x earnings.

Which is why we think, despite already multiplying by four this year, the share price is poised for even higher growth once Q3 earnings are released in a few weeks.

In other words, gold companies are STILL cheap compared to gold, and offer leverage beyond physical gold.

If you own shares in a company that can produce gold at $1,000 per ounce, in a way its like buying gold at $1,000 per ounce. And that’s a pretty fantastic deal these days.

Right now it’s still possible to buy into these gold companies at cheap valuations, delivering gains that could far outpace gold.

So we really want to encourage you to check out our premium investment research— it’s called The 4th Pillar, where we feature these undervalued gold companies… along with other real asset businesses ranging from silver to platinum to oil to industrial metals to agriculture.

Many of our picks are up 2-4x just this year alone, and based on our analysis, we think there’s scope for them to go much higher over the next few months based on Q3 earnings (which will be released in a few weeks).

We’re offering a limited time promotional discount to The 4th Pillar, along with our iron-clad money back guarantee. So definitely take a few minutes to learn more about it and consider joining.

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On December 26, 1933, US Secretary of State Cordell Hull sat in a conference room in Montevideo, Uruguay, chain-smoking— as usual.

It was just months into Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term as president. In the midst of the Great Depression, the new administration was trying to turn the page from America’s imperialist era and become (what FDR called) “a good neighbor” in the region.

So Roosevelt sent Cordell Hull— a tall, austere Tennessean to build relationships in Latin America.

Hull was was polite, unshakably formal, and most importantly—stone cold sober in a room full of diplomats who treated every negotiation session like a vineyard tour.

It was perhaps because Hull might have been the only delegate who wasn’t falling-down-drunk that, by the end of the conference, a series of landmark agreements had been signed— everything from women’s rights to non-intervention—including the Convention on the Rights and Duties of States.

Born out of border disputes in South America, this document established the modern legal definition of statehood, with four main pillars:

• Permanent Population – A stable group of people living in the territory.
• Defined Territory – Clearly recognized borders, even if not fully settled.
• Government – An organized central political authority that exercises control.
• Capacity to Enter into Relations with Other States – The ability to engage diplomatically and sign treaties.

I found this interesting this week as the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia, and other countries formally recognized Palestine as a sovereign state during the UN General Assembly.

At a minimum, Palestine doesn’t meet the definition of having an effective central authority—one part of the West Bank is run by the Palestinian Authority, while the other is run by the Israeli military, and Gaza is run by Hamas— a terrorist group that openly targets civilians and uses its own people as human shields.

In the end, this recognition was just more destructive derangement from the Left.

It’s ironic that countries like Britain are so concerned about Palestine when they have already utterly destroyed themselves with immigration. So much so, that they now have to cover their mistakes by arresting people for posting online, threatening to arrest others simply for being openly Jewish, or even just looking at the wrong meme.

Despite this endless track record of failure, the Leftists in charge change nothing.

Even while holding near-total power in many countries, and dominating single-party cities and states in the US, their policies and ideas are proven failures.

Yet they still blame the other side while refusing to make a single adjustment or course correction.

And if you call them out, they won’t argue on the merits of ideas. Instead, they’ll label you a racist, a fascist, or “far-right”.

If that doesn’t work, they’ll resort to outright violence.

Today we dive into a number of these failures—from Palestine to Jimmy Kimmel to Iryna Zarutska—and come away with a conclusion.

To be frank, I’m not sure the UK and Europe are going to recover.

But America is going to get past this deep ideological divide.

America has been through worse.

Back in the early 1900s, anarchists, Bolsheviks, and socialists were blowing up buildings, assassinating politicians, and planting bombs in public squares.

You might remember the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti from history class—two anarchists convicted of murder in 1920. That wasn’t some isolated case. The left-wing violence of the era was widespread and organized.

And yet, the country pulled through.

As crazy as the world seems today, there’s still a lot of reason for optimism.

That’s what we talk about in today’s podcast episode.

You can listen here.

You can find the podcast transcript here.

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In December 1901, Guglielmo Marconi, a self-taught Italian inventor and pioneer of wireless telegraphy, stood on a blustery hilltop in Newfoundland and heard the faint, rhythmic taps of Morse code—the letter “S”—transmitted wirelessly from across the Atlantic.

It was the first time a radio signal had crossed an ocean, proving that long-distance wireless communication was possible.

His success sparked a global explosion of interest in wireless broadcasting. Amateur hobbyists began rigging up transmitters in garages and barns. Commercial ships installed radios for safety and navigation. News services started experimenting with real-time transmission.

Within a few short years, the airwaves were a chaotic mess—signals clashing, overlapping, and cutting each other off mid-transmission.

The electromagnetic spectrum had become a chaotic free-for-all. So naturally, the government stepped in to impose some law and order in this wireless Wild West.

It took until 1927, with the passage of the Radio Act, for the federal government to organize and allocate the broadcast spectrum.

The law created the Federal Radio Commission, the precursor to today’s FCC.

According to the Radio Act, anyone who wanted to broadcast had to apply for a license for an exclusive protected frequency to transmit their signals.

But there was one catch. The government recognized that the broadcast spectrum was limited—a scarce public resource. So every applicant had to prove that their station would serve “public convenience, interest, or necessity.”

That standard still applies to this day.

You might be surprised to learn that even in the era of Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+, there’s still a substantial amount of broadcast spectrum in the US allocated to over-the-air television—roughly 300 megahertz.

This is a significant amount; by comparison, 300 MHz constitutes approximately 25% of all broadcast spectrum currently allocated to 5G networks.

But instead of using that spectrum to make 5G mobile signals faster and stronger, that 300 MHz remains reserved for the likes of ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, and their affiliate broadcast stations.

That’s especially absurd given that Washington has poured over $42 billion into rural internet initiatives just since Biden’s “infrastructure” law, with little to show for it.

Meanwhile, the real solution to strengthening America’s digital infrastructure has been staring them in the face on late night TV.

If the roughly 300 MHz still reserved for over-the-air television, were to be reallocated to mobile data networks, it would instantly expand available 5G bandwidth by 25%, boosting speed, coverage, and reliability nationwide.

More importantly, shifting this spectrum from legacy TV to modern mobile networks would deliver high-speed internet to underserved regions at a fraction of the cost, with 500 to 1,000 times more usage than the trickle of traffic currently watching TV.

Remember, the TV stations essentially receive a monopoly over US airwaves, and in exchange they are supposed to serve “public convenience, interest, or necessity”.

Yet everyone in America has to suffer a crappier mobile signal so that Jimmy Kimmel can have a platform to trash the President on TV every night (and get paid $15 million a year to do it!)

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past few days since Jimmy Kimmel was taken off the air. Many are calling it censorship. Even Senator Ted Cruz weighed in, saying it was “mafia tactics” and accusing the government of heavy-handed coercion.

Let’s not be naïve. Obviously when the FCC chairman went on the record saying “we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” it sent a clear message.

But I don’t think Disney needed that much of a push.

These late night shows already lose money. No one’s watching them. Kimmel, Colbert, Fallon, etc. are competing for tiny scraps— the handful of people who still watch traditional TV at all.

Kimmel (and Colbert) then went out of their way to alienate 50% of their already fledgling audience by becoming a rabid leftist… and then had to compete against the other late-night host still clawing for viewers from the same shrinking pile.

Given such dire circumstances, why would any rational business executive want to keep paying Kimmel $15 million? Disney was probably just looking for any excuse to end the show—and this was a pretty convenient one.

But the larger point here isn’t whether Jimmy Kimmel was censored or canceled. The real question is: why do any of these broadcast television stations still exist?

If there’s one thing that’s become crystal clear, it’s that these stations no longer serve the public “convenience, interest, or necessity.”

Their dramas and comedies routinely shove woke narratives down viewers’ throats. Some of these are completely absurd, like CBS’s The Equalizer featuring a 55-year old woman who beats up hardened criminals with her bare fists.

Plenty of other shows feature cultural norms that run completely counter to mainstream American values.

And to cap it all off, the late-night “entertainment” shows feature leftist drivel. Kimmel (who coincidentally delighted in Tucker Carlson’s firing from Fox News) once mused that unvaccinated people should die. His audience roared with delight.

But the worst part of these TV networks’ airwave monopoly is their ‘news’ divisions.

The nightly news was a key part of their “public convenience, interest, or necessity” going back to the 1927 Radio Act. And for decades, Americans turned in for trustworthy reporting.

Networks built their reputation on it and prided themselves on the credibility of their news divisions; and their FCC broadcast licenses were granted, in part, based on that commitment.

Titans like Walter Cronkite became national treasures. Tom Brokaw anchored the nation through 9/11. Whenever or wherever there was a critical moment in history, there they were— not just reporting the news, but telling the truth.

Today, those same divisions— ABC, NBC, and CBS news— have abandoned any pretense of objectivity. What was once public service has become political activism, then partisan propaganda, and blatant electoral manipulation.

In the September 2024 Presidential debate, ABC News “fact checked” Donald Trump 92 times, Kamala Harris zero times. CBS News “routinely edited” its interview with Kamala Harris, which just happened to make her look like a more decisive and intelligent candidate.

All three suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, and all three ran endlessly with the Russia hoax.

It’s painfully obvious that these networks do not serve the public good anymore. But worse, they have played a major role in deepening America’s terrible ideological divide.

This hyper-partisanship that they helped create is a key reason why Charlie Kirk is dead.

ABC, NBC, and CBS have been able to peddle their poison because they hold exclusive rights to airwaves that are owned by the public. They were given a gift, and they’ve routinely abused it.

Given modern technology, those publicly-owned airwaves could be easily repurposed for something far more valuable—delivering a literally 1,000x benefit to society through expanded mobile data and high-speed rural internet.

So the real question isn’t whether Jimmy Kimmel was canceled.

It’s, why haven’t ALL the broadcast networks lost their monopoly over the public airwaves— which are collectively owned by every man, woman, and child in America?

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In 1976, a young immigrant named Osama Siblani landed in the United States, full of gratitude for his adopted new country.

Siblani was escaping the brutal and bloody civil war that was tearing apart his native homeland of Lebanon, and America represented the peaceful haven of freedom and opportunity that he was seeking.

He settled in a modest Detroit suburb called Dearborn, and after a few years he launched a bilingual publication for his fellow immigrants from the Middle East called The Arab American News.

Soon, Silbani was living the American dream— safe, prosperous, and he even had his own business which had become the most popular publication of its kind.

But over time Silbani’s views— and the views expressed in The Arab American News, began to change.

By 2004, with the US engaged in two wars abroad, Siblani told The Washington Post: “Mr. Bush believes Hezbollah, Hamas and other Palestinian factions are terrorists, but we believe they are freedom fighters.”

Keep in mind, by this time, Hezbollah and Hamas were responsible for hundreds of terrorist attacks.

Hezbollah had actually bombed the US Embassy in Beirut (Silbani’s home country) in 1983, killing 63 people. Later that year they struck the Marine barracks, murdering 241 US service members in their sleep.

Throughout the 1990s, Hamas became infamous for suicide bombings—buses, cafés, markets—dozens of civilians slaughtered in one attack after another.

But Siblani saw them as “freedom fighters”.

His stance never changed. In 2022, he said, “Blessed [be] the blood of jihadi martyrs that irrigates the land of Palestine,” praising terrorists for “striking them with knives and with their bare hands…”

Even after the October 7, 2023 attacks which killed 1,200 innocent Israeli civilians, Siblani insisted that “Hamas is not a terrorist organization.”

At a rally in 2024, as the crowd chanted “Death to Israel,” Siblani celebrated. “America is changing,” he said. “Look at the universities,” where students engage in rampant support for Hamas terrorists.

Silbani also said they should take Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, “back to Poland,”— a reference to Nazi death camps during the Holocaust.

Well, Silbani’s adopted town of Dearborn, Michigan just named a street after him.

What a wild inversion. We all watched the hysteria in 2020 as monuments were torn down and schools renamed because the people they honored— some of whom lived hundreds of years ago— were insufficiently “progressive” by modern standards.

George Washington. Abraham Lincoln. Thomas Jefferson. These men were apparently so ‘evil’ that many of their monuments were removed. But Silbani? A man whose views are flagrantly antithetical to mainstream American values is being honored.

Now, I still believe in Freedom of Speech, even (and especially) when that speech infuriates me. Silbani has a right to express his views. But that doesn’t mean he should be honored by the very city that took him in when he fled his homeland.

It turns out that not every resident in Dearborn was thrilled about naming a street after Silbani.

At a Dearborn City Council meeting last week, one local resident called it outrageous, saying, “I feel like having that sign up there is almost like naming a street Hezbollah Street or Hamas Street. Hezbollah bombed the embassy in Beirut, including many Americans. I just feel it’s quite inappropriate.”

Fortunately, Democracy worked. That Mayor heard these comments and realized, “You’re right, we shouldn’t name a street after someone who praises terrorist groups that kill Americans.”

Just kidding. The Mayor threw the guy out. Almost literally.

The Mayor of Dearborn, Mr. Abdullah Hammoud, responded: “You’re an Islamophobe. And although you live here, I want you to know, as Mayor, you are not welcome here.”

The Mayor went on to say he would throw a parade the day this concerned resident moves out of the city.

This is not actually surprising to anyone familiar with Mayor Abdullah Hammoud.

At that 2024 rally, he took the stage seconds after Siblani threatened to send Netanyahu to a concentration camp, as the crowd chanted “Death to Israel” and “Allahu Akbar.”

And having someone like him in charge is exactly what Siblani has been working towards for decades.

In 2024, Siblani said that 40 years ago, the then-mayor of Dearborn warned of the city’s “Arab problem.” But now “the Arabs are ruling Dearborn… We are on the road to the White House, to Congress, to the decision-making everywhere in the US.”

It always starts small.

Dearborn is a tiny fraction of the US— .03% of the population.

You could shrug your shoulders and ignore it. But how big does a movement have to be before it’s worth paying attention to?

We’ve written before about what’s happened in the UK and Europe: countries that sacrificed their culture, their children, their wives to the immigrants they welcomed. And their governments looked the other way as these immigrants committed rape, murder, and the grooming of children.

That starts somewhere. And it would be disingenuous to say it’s not happening in America too.

Today, local Muslim leaders are telling Americans they are not welcome in their own communities, in their own country.

And that country, ironically, is one whose values and culture allowed a Lebanese immigrant to escape his war-torn country, start a successful business, and use his power of free speech to destroy those very same values.

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To the surprise of absolutely no one, the Federal Reserve announced its decision yesterday to cut interest rates… and kept the door open to further rate cuts in the future.

The funny thing is that we’ll never truly know why.

Sure, it’s possible that Fed officials honestly felt that the economy needs lower rates (despite obviously persistent inflation risks).

Of course, it’s also possible that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell finally caved to all the insults and pressure from the President.

Or that the rest of the FOMC members looked at what’s happening with Lisa Cook and submitted to inevitability, fearing that they too would be investigated for mortgage fraud (or some other criminal matter) if they didn’t cut rates.

Again, we may never know their real motivations. But it’s clear that the White House has gotten its way.

The President and Treasury Secretary believe that lower rates will stimulate the economy, raise wages, raise asset prices, improve housing affordability, and broadly create conditions for economic prosperity… and they’ve been pushing hard for rate cuts.

Lower rates will also help bail out the US government— whose national debt is so gargantuan that the Treasury is set to spend $1.2 trillion this Fiscal Year (which ends on September 30) just to pay interest.

The Trump administration sees lower rates as the key to slashing that annual interest bill.

Of course, a better solution would be to cut spending, bring the budget closer into balance, and reduce America’s debt-to-GDP ratio.

Putting America’s fiscal house in order would also attract investment in US government bonds the old-fashioned way— by restoring confidence that the US Treasury can pay back its debts through growth, strength, and prestige.

But making such cuts is politically difficult. Even the party that claims to be fiscally conservative isn’t really that interested in meaningful spending cuts.

So, they’re going with Plan B– push the Fed to lower interest rates.

But as we’ve argued before, they’re setting themselves up for disappointment.

Remember what happened last year— between September and December 2024, the Fed cut rates three times for a total of 1%. Yet over that same period, US government bond yields actually INCREASED by 1%.

This proves that the Fed can’t just snap its fingers and force interest rates lower simply by having a committee meeting.

Interest rates are ultimately determined by supply and demand for money. So if they Fed really wants to see lower rates, they’re going to have to intervene directly in the bond market.

They’ve done this many times before– this is when the Fed ‘prints’ money, i.e. what they call “quantitative easing”. And the most recent example was during the pandemic when the Fed created about $5 trillion of new money.

They used that money to buy government bonds– essentially creating artificial demand for Treasurys that pushed yields down to record lows.

And life felt pretty good for a while– people were able to buy homes and finance mortgages at rates lower than 3%. The government was able to sell 10-year debt for less than 0.5%.

But all those trillions of dollars of new money from the Fed came at a consequence: inflation soared to 9%— the highest in decades.

This is the major tradeoff that the Fed is facing right now: the White House wants lower interest rates. And the Fed seems to be capitulating to the pressure.

But for interest rates to get really low (and remain there), the Fed will almost certainly have to engage in more Quantitative Easing… and that means more inflation.

That alone is going to push a lot more capital into the gold market.

For the past few years, foreign governments and central banks have been selling off their US dollar reserves and funneling that money into gold; this has been the primary reason why gold has soared to all-time highs.

And with the Fed’s capitulation on rates, this trend will continue.

It’s also very likely that pension funds, insurance funds, and other long-term institutional investors will seek refuge in gold as well, driving the price even higher.

To be clear, this isn’t a prediction that gold is going to go up every day, or every month, or even every year.

But if you take a longer-term view—say, 8 to 10 years when the US national debt hits $60 trillion and Social Security runs out of funds— the case for owning gold becomes even more compelling.

I don’t hold this view because I’m a “gold bug”. I’m not fanatical about a hunk of metal. But I do understand these long-term trends, and in my view, we’re still in the early innings.

Another option is to buy gold-related companies, which can offer powerful leverage to the metal itself.

Central banks buy physical gold. They do not buy shares of gold companies. That’s why, even as gold surged, many of the companies we researched traded at dirt-cheap valuations—as low as 2-3x earnings in some cases.

But investors are starting to catch on and pay attention to these deeply undervalued businesses; in fact, we’ve seen several companies in our portfolio gain up to 4x, some even just over the last few months.

Given that Q3 earnings are coming up just around the corner, we believe that some of these gold (and related silver and platinum) companies are about to post record earnings and could see their share prices soar even more.

If you’re interested, we publish all of this investment research, including detailed analysis of deeply undervalued gold companies, in our premium service.

It’s called the 4th Pillar, and we’re currently offering a limited time 40% promotional discount; click here to learn more.

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US Senator Joseph McCarthy was in the middle of an otherwise boring speech at the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia on February 9, 1950, when he pulled out a nondescript piece of paper from his jacket pocket.

Waving the paper into the air for all to see, Senator McCarthy proclaimed that he possessed a list of more than 200 known Communists in the United States, and that he would make sure they were all outed and punished.

McCarthy spent the next several years besmirching many innocent people’s reputations– from actors like Charlie Chaplin and Lucille Ball, to physicists Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein.

But McCarthy held all the cards; people were so afraid of being publicly accused that they kept silent and submitted to his reign of terror. It took nearly five years for the Senate to finally summon the courage and put a stop to it.

This has been the tactic of the Left for roughly seven years now.

Despite a record of abject failure– open borders, multiculturalism, COVID lockdowns, DEI, criminal justice reform, green policies, etc. that have destroyed their own strongholds from San Francisco to Chicago to New York– they’re hypersensitive to even the slightest criticism.

We’ve seen it for years now: if express concern about people getting stabbed on the metro then you’re a racist. Vote anything but Left and you’re a fascist.

They don’t argue. They don’t debate. They just pull a McCarthy: they smear, shout, and denounce you with some of the worst names you can label a human being.

Nazi. Fascist. White supremacist. To say nothing of Misogynist, Transphobe. Islamophobe. Xenophobe.

And for a while, the Left’s McCarthyist tactics worked like a charm.

For nearly eight years—starting with the #MeToo movement in 2017—all they had to do was point and accuse. Call someone a predator, a harasser, a threat to women, and it was over. No evidence required.

Look at Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh: the Left reached back more than four decades to when he was a teenager in high school and turned it into a public inquisition.

They forced the nation into believing that due process was no longer valid. No more presumption of innocence. No right to clear your name. Instead, we must “believe all women” (except for the ones who accused Bill Clinton and Joe Biden).

And it worked so well, they ran the same scam again and again.

After George Floyd’s death, if you were against burning and looting cities, you were labeled a white supremacist.

During COVID, if you questioned mandates, masks, or lockdowns, you were an anti-vaxxer, a science denier, a grandma killer.

People lost their jobs, their reputations, their businesses for wrongthink. For not being sufficiently outraged. For asking questions.

The Left kept this moral high ground in its clutches for nearly eight years, weaponizing it to bludgeon anyone who dared step out of line.

And it worked. They silenced millions of people who were afraid of being called a racist.

But the Left started to lose control when people finally began connecting the dots—realizing that these failed policies were destroying America.

Yet instead of acknowledging their failures or offering a clear plan to fix anything, the Left did what they always do: they doubled down.

They sent Barack Obama out during the 2024 election to insult voters and tell young black males they weren’t man enough to vote for a woman President.

They rolled out new labels and created new slurs. Trump and his voters constituted a “threat to democracy” and western civilization writ large.

Their relentless demonization resulted in two separate assassination attempts… after which they blamed “both sides”. Their subsequent promises to ‘tone down the rhetoric’ lasted all of fifteen minutes before they started up the “threat to democracy” chorus again.

Even after they lost the 2024 election, the Left still refused to reflect and correct; and so the entirety of 2025 so far has been the exact same McCarthyist tactics.

When Iryna Zarutska was brutally murdered on a train in Charlotte (thanks to the indulgences of a woke local judiciary), the Left defended her killer and denounced people as “racist”– including Charlie Kirk– simply for being outraged over Zarutska’s murder.

Days later when Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the media dismissed him as a “far-right” political commentator. And those were the polite ones. Others described him as a “hate monger”, “bigot”, and “white nationalist”.

And, just days after that when a rally in the UK brought out 1+ million people protesting their incompetent government’s failures (and crackdowns on free speech), the BBC called the participants “far right” and “racists”.

The Left is still grasping to the one power they have. They refuse to admit their failures. They have to plan to fix anything. So instead, they simply denounce their critics as evil racists and fascists.

But like Senator McCarthy in the 1950s, they’ve overplayed their hand. The Left has become the Boy who Cried Wolf… or in this case, the Angry Progressive who Cried Racist.

No one believes them anymore. And so, the one power they had– to hold people hostage with the threat of being called vile names– is collapsing right in front of our eyes.

Remember that if you happen to be accosted by a deranged Leftist lunatic– someone who shrieks at you for being a Nazi or racist. The only response is– “F*ck you, that doesn’t work anymore.”

These people are finished. And it’s thanks to Charlie Kirk.

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