Escobar: Empire Of Chaos, Plunder, & Strikes In Panic Of Being Evicted From Eurasia

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

The whole planet is somehow convulsed by neo-Caligula’s latest scam: because he did not get his “peace” Nobel from Norway, part of his megalomanic narcissist revenge is to bag Greenland from Denmark (in Empire-speak, who cares? These Scandinavians are all the same anyway).

In neo-Caligula’s own words: “The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”

That seals the Empire of Chaos completely morphed into the Empire of Plunder and now the Empire of Permanent Strikes.

Assorted Euro-chihuahuas dared to dispatch a tiny bunch of dog-sled conductors to defend Greenland from neo-Caligula. To no avail. They were instantly hit with tariffs. The strike remains in effect until the “complete and total purchase” of Greenland.

Euro-chihuahuas – following the Global South – may have finally woken up to the new paradigm: Strike Geopolitics.

Neo-Caligula did not get regime change in Caracas – and his oil mirage was refuted even by US energy majors. He did not get regime change in Tehran – even if CIA, Mossad and assorted NGOs worked full time to deliver.

So Plan C is Greenland, essential for imperial lebensraum purposes, as collateral for the unpayable $38 trillion – and rising – debt.

By all means that does not imply ditching the Iran obsession. The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier is moving into a position in the Sea of Oman/Persian Gulf where it would be able to strike Iran before the end of the week. All attack scenarios remain in place.

Assuming all hell breaks loose, this may become an even more humiliating replay of the 12-day war in June last year, which the death cult in West Asia spent as much as 14 months planning.

The 12-day war not only failed as a regime change op; it engendered a sample of Iranian retaliation so hardcore that Tel Aviv still has not recovered. Tehran has been explicit, over and over again, that the same fate awaits neo-Caligula’s forces in Iran and across the Gulf in case of renewed strikes.

Why the regime change obsession endures

As for the equally, miserably failed regime change op on Iran these past few weeks, it featured on the forefront the pathetic Clown Prince Reza Pahlavi, safely ensconced in Maryland, massively plugged by US media as a “unifying political figure” capable of reassessing the “lived catastrophe of clerical rule”.

Neo-Caligula was too busy to care about these ideological niceties. What he wanted was to accelerate the proceedings by – what else – applying Empire of Permanent Strikes logic: bombing Iran.

Diversionist spin, predictably, went ballistic. The death cult in West Asia may have asked Moscow to tell Tehran that they would not strike if Iran did not strike first. As if Tehran – and Moscow – could trust anything coming from Tel Aviv.

The Gulfie crowd – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman – may have asked neo-Caligula not to strike, because that would have set the whole Gulf on fire and generate “grave blowback”.

The real deal – once again – was TACO. There was simply no gamed US strike scenario that would have allowed lightning quick regime change, the only acceptable outcome. Thus back to bagging Greenland.

It took only a few days to unmask the massive propaganda campaign across NATOstan about “mass casualties” among Iran protesters.

The – fake – figures came from the Center for Human Rights in Iran, located in, where else, New York, and financed by the CIA-infested National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Washington and other assorted disinformation entities.

The list of reasons for urgent regime change in Iran though remains off the charts, featuring, among others, these four key elements:

1. Tehran must ditch the Axis of Resistance across West Asia supporting Palestine.

2. Because Iran is at the privileged crossroads of trade/energy connectivity corridors in Eurasia, both its connections with the
   International North–South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) and China’s New Silk Roads (BRI) must be severed. That means blowing up from the inside organic intra-BRICS cooperation between Russia, Iran, India and China.

3. As over 90% of Iranian oil exports go to China – and are settled in yuan – that’s a serious threat to the petrodollar: the ultimate anathema. That’s where in Empire of Permanent Strikes terms, Iran aligns with Venezuela. It’s our – petrodollar – way or the highway.

4. The staying power of the never-ending dream of an Iran under the Shah remix – complete with a Shah-style SAVAK secret police; cozy Mossad ties to rein in those Arab barbarians; and a sprawling CIA-run net of surveillance hubs targeting both Russia and China.

How to counter a “regime-change war”

Tehran is not spooked by sanctions – as it has endured over 6,000 of them over four decades, designed to totally strangle its economy and even bring oil exports, in imperial terminology, down “to zero”.

Even under maximum pressure, Iran was capable of building the most extensive industrial base across West Asia; relentlessly invested in self-sufficiency and state of the art military hardware; joined the SCO in 2023 and BRICS in 2024; and for all practical purposes developed a top Global South knowledge economy.

Tsunamis of – digital – ink have been spent on why China has not properly helped Iran so far against imperial maximum pressure, for instance supporting Tehran against the speculative attacks on the rial. That would have cost Beijing almost nothing – compared to its level of foreign reserves.

The speculative attack on the rial was arguably the essential trigger of the protests across Iran. It’s essential to remember that hunger salaries were a key contributor to the collapse of Syria.

It’s up to Beijing to – diplomatically – answer this uncomfortable question. The spirit of BRICS Plus – call it Bandung 1955 Plus – may not survive when we all know this current world war is essentially about resources and finance, which need to be mobilized and properly deployed.

And that brings us to China’s leadership seriously evaluating whether it’s worth to remain a sort of larger version of Germany: embryonically self-centered; harboring fear; and fundamentally selfish in economic and financial terms. The – auspicious – alternative is for China to create sufficiently sized credit facilities within BRICS to an array of friendly nations.

Whatever happens next, it’s clear that the Empire of Permanent Strikes not only will remain “actively hostile” to a multipolar, multi-nodal world; the hostility will be marinated in a toxic sludge of anger and revenge, and subordinated to the ultimate, panic fear: the Empire’s slowly but surely, inexorable expulsion from Eurasia.

Cue to White House Special Representative Witkoff – the real estate Bismarck – enouncing the imperial diktats to Iran:

1. Stop enriching uranium. Out of the question,

2. Reduce missile stockpiles. Out of the question.

3. Reduce approximately 2000 kg of enriched nuclear material (3.67–60 %). That might be negotiated.

4. Stop supporting “regional proxies” – as in the Axis of Resistance. Out of the question.

Tehran will never bow down to the diktats. But even if it did, the – promised – imperial reward would be the lifting of sanctions (the US Congress will never do it) and a “return to the international community”. Iran is already part of the international community at the UN and inside BRICS, SCO and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), among other institutions.

So the neo-Caligula regime change obsession – in fact mirrored as a NATOstan obsession – will keep ruling. Tehran is not intimidated. Cue to the strategic advisor to Iran’s Parliament Speaker, Mahdi Mohammadi:

“We know that we are facing a regime-change war in which the only way to achieve victory is to make credible the threat that, during the 12-day war, although it was ready, did not get the opportunity to be carried out: a geographically expansive war of attrition, focused on the Persian Gulf energy markets, on the basis of steadily increasing missile firepower, lasting at least several months.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 23:25

Watch: Creepy Guy Trains Crows For Months To Attack MAGA Hats

A man styling himself "biz_dave" on Threads claims to have orchestrated what can only be described as the Resistance's most feather-brained gambit yet: training crows to pilfer red baseball caps in service of opposing President Donald Trump. Naturally, this has elevated him to something approaching sainthood among the online Resistance.

Dave claimed that the operation involved conditioning a murder of crows - a term that has never seemed more apt - to recognize a feeding station and subsequently engage in aerial larceny against red headwear. The sad man's admirers have dubbed the result an "anti-MAGA flying army," a phrase that does more to explain the current state of progressive activism than any think-piece possibly could, the Daily Star reports.

Dave has meticulously chronicled his ornithological jihad on Threads, offering videos, photographs, and a veritable field manual for those inspired to conscript their own backyard fauna into the culture wars. He began with the fundamentals of corvid care: "The crows will eat lots of things, but I recommend sticking to peanuts, chicken scraps, mealworms, and dog kibble." One pictures him at the grocery store, carefully selecting provisions for his feathered shock troops.

View on Threads

 

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Dave confessed that the true obstacle was less philosophical than practical.

"Getting the crows to come regularly to the feeding place took the longest. That was about a 4-month endeavor," he claimed. Four months - roughly the length of time required to master a foreign language or complete a professional certification - devoted instead to establishing diplomatic relations with local scavengers. Following a reliable peanut subsidy and months of patient courtship, the birds apparently agreed to join the cause. "Once they were coming regularly, it was only about three months to get them to the hat removal stage," Dave said, according to the Daily Star.

As is customary with such internet crusades, the project eventually metastasized from quirky stunt into moral imperative. Dave solemnly declared his political awakening: "I tried to be centrist for a long time but I no longer believe that is a moral option." Centrism having been ruled out, training crows to harass strangers was evidently the next logical step.

Even Reddit - not typically a bastion of leftwing restraint - produced some skeptics.

"OK, so I love this for the people wearing those red hats, but this would absolutely not be good for the crows," one user noted.

Another observed: "I really don't like pulling wild animals into stupid human shit like this."

A third commenter offered a tactical suggestion with a certain elemental appeal: "Now train it to poop on the hat."

After attempting to jail and assassinate Trump, training crows is all the anti-MAGA crusaders have left.

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 23:00

Australia Passes New Bills For Tougher Gun Control And Anti-Hate Speech Laws

Authored by Naziya Alvi Rahman via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Australian Parliament has passed two new bills that will set up a national gun buyback scheme, and attempt to combat anti-Semitism and hate speech in response to the Bondi terror attack.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on Jan. 19, 2026. Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images

In Australia’s lower house, the gun buyback bill passed 96 to 45 with the Liberal-National Coalition opposing, while the hate and extremism-focused bill passed with amendments, securing 116 votes to just seven.

Later on the evening of Jan. 20, both bills made it through the Senate.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wrote on X that the government was “standing against hate and strengthening” national security.

New Gun Buyback Passes Lower House After 3 Hours

The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Firearms and Customs Laws) Bill 2026 introduces not only the national gun buyback scheme, but new restrictions around background checks, the sale of firearm types, and new offences relating to accessing information online about firearms, ammunition, and accessories.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke told parliament that had such measures been in place earlier, the Bondi Beach attackers would not have been able to legally obtain weapons.

The father of the terrorist duo, Sajid Akram, owned six firearms, despite his son being interviewed and cleared by intelligence agencies over concerns of radicalisation.

The bill was debated for close to three hours, with several MPs proposing amendments.

Independent MP Zali Steggall sought to ensure firearms background checks explicitly included “criminal history or proceedings relating to domestic violence or AVOs issued in local courts.”

Bob Katter, the federal MP of Kennedy, moved an amendment that would automatically revoke a firearm licence for anyone placed on an ASIO watchlist. That amendment was defeated, 88 votes to 13.

Katter, who opposed the broader reforms, blamed the Bondi attack on failures in the immigration system and argued the legislation undermined gun ownership.

“If they get their way, then the only people that will have guns are the people in uniforms. And we know what sort of society that is, that the only people that have guns are the people in uniforms,” he said.

Member for Kennedy Bob Katter speaks to the media at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia on Jan. 20, 2026. Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images Nationals Leader Warns Gun Control a Diversion From Real Issue

Nationals leader David Littleproud opposed the bill, describing it as a diversion.

“This is nothing more than a cheap political diversion, a cheap political diversion that is not facing up to the real problem in this country, which is radical Islamists,” Littleproud said.

He argued the Bondi attack reflected failures in enforcement rather than licensing.

“The fact is, the authorities did not act and take away the licence and the weapons as they should have,” he said.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese defended the reforms, stressing they were not aimed at lawful firearm owners.

“This legislation is not about targeting farmers. It’s not about competitive shooters. It’s not about ... law-abiding firearm owners,” he said.

“The federal bill will establish a national gun buyback scheme to purchase surplus, newly banned and illegal firearms. The gun buybacks scheme is based on the same scheme that was introduced under John Howard, Tim Fischer and Kim Beazley, three leaders who all stood up at an important moment for Australia.”

Victims Only Need to Feel Fear Under New Hate Laws

The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Bill 2026 also passed with amendments from the opposition.

The legislation introduces a new federal offence making it illegal to publicly promote or incite racial hatred where the conduct would cause a reasonable person to feel intimidated, harassed or fearful of violence.

The offence applies to speech, symbols, gestures and online communication targeting people “because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the target.”

The law does not require proof that hatred was actually generated or that a victim felt fear—only that the conduct itself would reasonably cause intimidation or fear.

Maximum penalties of up to five years’ imprisonment apply, with higher penalties for aggravated offences, including cases involving religious officials or attempts to radicalise children. A narrow defence applies where speech or writing consists solely of quoting religious texts for teaching or discussion.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley confirmed Liberal MPs supported the amended bill.

“In the national interest, the Liberal party has today stepped up to fix legislation that the Albanese government badly mishandled,” Ley said in a statement issued after passing of the bill.

Ley said the amendments narrowed the bill’s scope to anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism, ensured new powers focused on serious criminal conduct, and required consultation with the opposition before extremist organisations could be listed or de-listed.

Crossbench Concerns About Bill’s Scope and Speed

Independent Teal MP Allegra Spender criticised both major parties for removing anti-vilification provisions from the bill, saying those measures had been sought by Jewish community groups and the government’s anti-Semitism envoy.

“My question is, what are the mechanisms you are saying that we can use now because you have rejected something that the Jewish community has been calling for a long time,” she said.

Spender warned that the current law was not specific enough, arguing Muslim and other migrant groups could be made to feel “suspect by association by failing to confront hateful individuals and ideologies directly.”

Independent "Teal" Member for Wentworth Allegra Spender speaks in the House of Representatives at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia on Jan. 19, 2026. Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images

“We drift towards a culture of guilt by association rather than accountability,” she said.

Independent MP Helen Haines also raised concerns about the legislative process.

“The inquiry into this bill was only tabled this morning,” she said. “But the consequence of haste, as a legislator, is the missed opportunity to carefully consider and improve this significant legislation.”

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 22:35

US Antimony Strengthens Domestic Supply Chain With Montana Mill Purchase

United States Antimony Corporation announced this morning that it has completed the acquisition of a fully operational critical minerals flotation facility in Radersburg, Montana, strengthening the company’s domestic processing footprint for antimony and other strategic minerals. As a reminder and as we noted late last year, UAMY operates the only two antimony smelters in North America.

The company said it closed on the $4.75 million all-cash purchase of the property and equipment on January 16, 2026. The Radersburg facility, located between Helena and Bozeman, sits within roughly 250 miles of US Antimony’s Thompson Falls smelter, which is currently undergoing a major expansion and modernization that remains on track for completion and commissioning in February.

According to the company's press release, the Radersburg Mill is equipped with both gravity and flotation circuits, allowing it to concentrate a wide range of minerals, including stibnite, the primary ore mineral for antimony, as well as gold, silver, copper, tungsten, and other metals. The facility includes crushing and grinding circuits, slurry-based recovery systems, and tailings storage ponds with water recycling capabilities.

Gravity concentration equipment at the site has historically been used to produce high-grade gold concentrates, while the flotation circuits can be tailored with specific reagents to recover various metals. The company noted the mill has previously processed gold, silver, copper, lead, and zinc, and could be adapted to concentrate cobalt, tungsten, platinum group metals, rare earth elements, and other critical minerals.

In addition to the purchase price, US Antimony has budgeted approximately $2 million for future capital improvements to enhance specific equipment at the facility.

Commenting on the acquisition, Chairman and CEO Gary C. Evans said the flotation mill is a necessary link in the company’s production chain. “In order for us to concentrate our raw ore from both Alaska and Montana, we must first utilize a modern flotation mill to properly concentrate the material to a high enough level that we can then feed the various furnaces located in our smelters in order to produce mil-spec antimony trisulfide,” Evans said.

He added that owning the Radersburg facility outright provides greater operational control compared with leasing. US Antimony previously leased a similar mill in Philipsburg, Montana, but canceled that lease in September 2025 after negotiations with the owners became difficult. “Making necessary capital improvements to a leased facility versus one that we control 100% made this an easy decision,” Evans said.

Evans described the acquisition as another step in reinforcing the company’s vertically integrated model. “This transaction announced today is another ‘leg on our stool’ as a fully integrated antimony company in order to maximize profitability, control our destiny, and meet the ever-growing needs of our customers whether they be industrial or the federal government,” he said.

United States Antimony announced in Q4 last year that it had received a $10 million delivery order under its newly signed indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity sole-source contract with the US Defense Logistics Agency. The order covered 315,000 lbs. of antimony metal ingots, which will be used to replenish the US National Defense Stockpile.

Antimony, a critical mineral which is used in munitions, batteries, flame retardants, and military-grade compounds, has been flagged by defense officials as a vulnerability in the U.S. industrial base.

The Trump administration has made domestic supply-chain resilience a policy priority. Trump has taken a series of executive and policy actions aimed at securing U.S. access to critical minerals, citing national security and economic independence.

Recall, last year we laid out all the winners in the coming critical mineral scramble in "The Coming Rare Earth Revolution And How To Profit: All You Need To Know About The "Ex-China Supply Chain." Those who put on the recommended baskets are currently enjoying high double-digit gains. 

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 22:10

CBS Finally Airs Updated '60 Minutes' Report On US Deportations To Salvadoran Prison

Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

CBS’s “60 Minutes” finally aired its report on the Trump administration’s deportations, more than a month after the segment was taken down from the program’s lineup.

Guards stand outside a cell block at the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT) in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on April 4, 2025. Alex Peña/Getty Images

In the report, broadcast on Jan. 18, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi examined deportees sent to El Salvador’s maximum-security prison, known by its Spanish acronym CECOT. It aired without any mention of the story having previously been pulled from its originally scheduled date, Dec. 21, 2025.

The unaired segment nevertheless appeared online a day after it was pulled. Global TV, which airs “60 Minutes” in Canada, briefly featured the piece on its app, apparently by mistake.

CBS News said in an emailed statement to The Epoch Times that its leadership “has always been committed to airing the ‘60 Minutes’ CECOT piece as soon as it was ready.”

“Tonight, viewers get to see it, along with other important stories, all of which speak to CBS News’ independence and the power of our storytelling,” it said.

The segment, titled “Inside CECOT,” featured interviews with two Venezuelan men being held in the Salvadoran prison after being deported from the United States.

Last year, as part of an effort to deliver what President Donald Trump has said will be the largest deportation of illegal immigrants in U.S. history, he invoked the wartime Enemy Aliens Act to fast-track the removal of alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The Trump administration paid the Salvadoran government millions of dollars to send more than 200 of those Venezuelan deportees to CECOT.

The two Venezuelans interviewed by “60 Minutes” described conditions inside the prison, which they said included beatings, living in cramped cells where the lights stayed on 24 hours a day, and being forced to kneel for hours at a time.

The report was largely unchanged from the Dec. 22 version. The updated version included a short clip of Trump saying that CECOT has “very strong facilities” where security staff “don’t play games,” and another of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying that “heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, sexual assaulters, predators who have no right to be in this country” were sent there.

Alfonsi’s introduction was updated to open with the Jan. 3 military operation that led to the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, who is currently in U.S. custody awaiting trial on federal narco-terrorism charges. In the new material, she also said she obtained data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement suggesting 33 of the 252 Venezuelan prisoners had been convicted of a crime in the United States, and reiterated a statistic from the original report that eight had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense.

In the segment, Alfonsi said the Department of Homeland Security declined her request for an on-camera interview and referred questions about the prison to the government of El Salvador, which did not respond. DHS did, however, provide an explanation for why it would not share detailed records about the individuals sent to CECOT.

“We are confident in our law enforcement’s intelligence, and we aren’t going to share intelligence reports and undermine national security every time a gang member denies he is one,” DHS wrote in an email to CBS News shown in the segment. “That would be insane.”

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 21:45

Putting A Stake In Stakeholder Capitalism

Authored by Terrence Keeley via RealClearWorld,

The 56th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum convening in Davos on January 19-23 will be the first without its founder, Klaus Schwab. WEF’s new organizers should use the occasion to distance themselves from Schwab’s worst ideas: stakeholder capitalism, ESG investing and the net-zero energy paradigm.

Stakeholder capitalism is a concept invented by Schwab. Schwab’s argued for years that capitalism governed by shareholders would be vastly improved by systematically elevating the inputs of other stakeholders, like employees, supply chains, community values and the environment. ESG investing is the analytic framework upon which stakeholder capitalism largely depends. ESG rating agents use non-financial metrics to identify the “best” and “worst” companies to overweight, underweight or exclude in investment portfolios. Stakeholder capitalists broadly embraced the net-zero energy paradigm, aka “Paris +1.5°C by 2050 at all costs”. Net-zero commitments led many European countries to spend trillions on wind and solar investments at the expense of more reliable, more resilient and considerably cheaper energy alternatives, including fossil fuels. WEF’s acolytes have cheered them on as they did.

All of these concepts have harmed humanity. It’s crucial to understand how – and to stop misrepresenting them.

Stakeholder capitalism wrongly places responsibility for market failures on corporations. But corporations don’t define market opportunities: consumers and regulators do. Stakeholder capitalists have told oil and gas companies to stop production even when demand for their products and services continued to grow unabated. Stakeholder capitalists instruct companies to do things those company owners do not want or support. That’s not capitalism: that’s communism.

Private companies perpetually debate how and where societal values and their financial valuations align. No company can succeed without keeping their customers loyal and happy. Bureaucratic regulations and quixotic ESG metrics provide no useful information about how companies can better serve their clients: in fact, they often give destructive advice. The infamous Bud Light commercial that was meant to expand its appeal among marginalized communities resulted in a 25% market share decline. Milton Friedman claimed in his defining treatise, The Social Responsibility of Business, corporations must broadly reflect the ethics and priorities of those they serve. To not do so is self-immolating. Friedman was and remains 100% correct. Embracing values not widely shared destroys financial valuations for no tangible social gain.

By prioritizing stakeholder needs, environmental, social and governance investment mandates pledged to generate superior market returns alongside tangible societal benefit. They failed to deliver either. As opposed to impact investing, which verifiably brings about change intended by the investor, ESG investing has neither done much good nor very well. ESG’s broad underperformance was presciently anticipated by Vanguard’s fabled founder, John Bogle. Bogle rightly observed that, to optimize long-run investment performance, investors should own the whole market at the cheapest possible price. ESG investment funds willfully violate both of these common sense principles.

Companies that consistently operate in their shareholders’ best long-term interests are legally, financially and morally superior to those which attempt to prioritize other, more amorphous priorities. Investors who want their capital to improve environmental and social outcomes should abandon ESG investing and embrace impact investing. Trillions of dollars of public capital invested in solar and wind farms have saddled European consumers with electricity bills that are four times higher than those born by their counterparts in the US and China. Over-reliance on renewables also created energy intermittency that led to the deaths of seven Spanish and one Portuguese citizen in April 2025. All-of-the-above national energy strategies which embrace fossil fuels, nuclear and renewables create greater reliability, resilience and affordability. No country should abandon fossil fuels unless and until they have found more reliable, more abundant and cheaper alternatives.

In the closing paragraphs of the General Theory, John Maynard Keynes observed “The ideas of economists and political theorists – both when they are right and when they are wrong - are more powerful than is commonly understood.”

For WEF to best serve the common good, they should repudiate the wrong ideas their founder Klaus Schwab helped popularize. WEF will never be a respected voice for human flourishing until the forum returns to time-honored, proven ideas: free market principles coupled with effective philanthropy, authentic impact investment and sound public policy.

Terrence R Keeley is the CEO of the Impact Evaluation Lab and Author of Sustainable: Moving Beyond ESG to Impact Investing.

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 20:55

"Out Of Touch": Marylanders Fume As Gov. Moore Prioritizes Building Energy-Hungry 'Sphere' Amid Power Bill Crisis

Marylanders are raging at left-wing Governor Wes Moore, accusing him of fast-tracking a massively power-hungry Sphere entertainment venue near Washington, DC, while working-class households across the central part of the state are drowning under crushing electricity bills.

"So this Governor spends money he doesn't even have yet. 200 million dollars of the cost for the Sphere at National Harbor will come from the State of Maryland's 2027 budget. He is so out of touch with what MD residents need and doesn't care as long as his name is in the headlines every day," Maryland resident Amy Milberger Seaman wrote in a Facebook group called "BGE Victims," which has nearly 15,000 residents upset about exploding power bills.

Local media outlet WBAL-TV reported Monday that Sphere Entertainment plans to build its second U.S. Sphere venue in National Harbor, in Prince George's County.

The Sphere will be slightly smaller than the one in Las Vegas, seating 6,000. Gov. Moore called the project the largest economic development project in the county's history. The venue is expected to be funded through a mix of public and private financing, including $200 million in incentives from the state.

The venue will include an exosphere exterior LED display and a 16K x 16K interior screen, the highest-resolution LED display in the world.

Residents are furious about the new Sphere because at peak power, it uses around 28 megawatts (MW), enough to power roughly 21,000 homes. Adding more demand to an already tight power grid because of just bad policies, after years of backfiring' climate crisis' policies stripped reliable fossil fuel spare capacity.

Here's what others in the Facebook group are saying about Moore:

"He is an Obama want-a-be. He loves being a celebrity. Loves having his picture taken. So much so he has at least 3 photographers. Maybe more. He is a liar, clueless about budgets. Overspends our hard earned tax dollars. He needs to go," resident Cheryl Gaigler Utz said.

Resident Toby Allred said, "Wasteful spending!!! That's what Democratic politicians love to do with OUR money!!"

Others said, "Build a natural gas and Power Plants First!!!"

Maryland Democrats really dropped the ball on power grid management. They put a fake climate crisis first, retired fossil fuel power generators early, and denied any new reliable fossil fuel power generation capacity on the grid, all while pushing unreliable solar and wind. The end result of bad stewardship is bankrupting the working class in the central part of the state with exploding power bills.

Maryland is a one-party rule of Democratic kings and queens. Prioritizing the Sphere over working-class folks comes as no surprise. 

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 20:30

Pakistan To Send Chinese Warplanes To Libyan Faction Under Gen. Haftar

via Middle East Eye

Pakistan has sealed a deal worth over $4 billion to sell military equipment, including warplanes jointly built with China, to General Khalifa Haftar's Libyan National Army, according to a report by Reuters.

The deal could significantly alter the military balance of power in the oil-rich North African country, where Haftar rules over the eastern half and a UN-recognized government led by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh in Tripoli controls the west.

Pakistan Air Force JF-17, via Military Watch Magazine

"Please make your armed forces as strong as possible because armed forces did guarantee the existence of countries," Pakistan military chief Field Marshal Asim Munir said in a visit to Benghazi last week, where he met Haftar's son, Saddam. Reuters reported that the arms deal was finalized in that meeting.

"Libya is a land of lions," Munir said in a video clip of his address to Libyan National Army officers, referencing the Libyan Islamic Scholar Omar al-Mukhtar, whose struggle in the 1920-1930s against the Italian occupation of Libya was made famous in the 1981 movie Lion of the Desert starring Anthony Quinn.

A copy of the arms deal seen by Reuters before it was finalized said Haftar's LNA would purchase 16 JF-17 fighter jets, a multirole combat aircraft jointly developed by Pakistan and China, along with 12 Super Mushak trainer aircraft, used for basic pilot training.

One of the Pakistani officials who spoke with Reuters said the agreement would be spread over two and a half years, with land, sea and air equipment included. Two Pakistani officials said the deal could reach up to $4.6bn - Pakistan's largest in history.

Neither the Tripoli government nor Haftar's forces have a substantial air force. Haftar made a failed bid to conquer Tripoli in 2019 with the backing of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Russia. Turkey intervened to defend the government in Tripoli, sending mercenaries and TB2 drones. Since then, it has stationed thousands of troops in the Western half of Libya and sealed a controversial maritime agreement with the government in Tripoli.

Dbeibeh was nominated prime minister of Libya in 2021 as part of a UN-backed process to prepare the country for elections. Instead, he has consolidated power in his hands and curried favor with powerful militias that control Tripoli to stay in power.

After the NATO-led removal of longtime ruler Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libya became a theatre for proxy conflict between Gulf states and Turkey. However, those battle lines have blurred in recent years.

Libya's shifting alliances

The UAE and Saudi Arabia have extended ties to Tripoli, while Turkey has courted Haftar through his son and likely successor, Saddam. Earlier this year, discussions were held about Khalifa Haftar visiting Turkey, but the visit never materialized.

Islamabad is close to both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The latter remains the closest Gulf state to Haftar, but Saudi Arabia also provided support and lobbied on his behalf. Russia's embassy in Riyadh once served as a facilitator for Haftar's close ties to Moscow, MEE reported.

The Haftar family's ties with Egypt have come under strain over their support and coordination with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan.

Libya's lawless southeast and Sudan's Darfur share a border, and Haftar has facilitated the shipment of arms to the RSF, MEE has reported. Arab officials in June said that forces aligned with Haftar launched a cross-border attack alongside the RSF on forces loyal to the Sudanese army, which Cairo backs.

Pakistan's decision to sell arms to Haftar could also complicate its diplomatic relations with a key partner. While the Gulf states may not be alarmed by the deal, it could rile Turkey, which has close diplomatic and security links to Pakistan.

Lieutenant General Saddam Haftar (L) with his father Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar. Source: The Arab Weekly/social media

Ankara backs Pakistan in its territorial dispute with India over Kashmir. Turkey is the third largest arms supplier to Pakistan, although it is massively outperformed by the largest, China.

Pakistan's rising role

Pakistan's cash-strapped government is trying to boost its arms exports, capitalising on its military hardware's performance in a deadly military clash with India in May.

Arms have poured into Libya for years despite an arms embargo that the UN has imposed on the country since 2011.mAlthough Pakistan will be selling Chinese weapons to Haftar, Pakistan's relations with the US have also improved substantially since President Donald Trump returned to the White House.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize in October, live from a Gaza ceasefire signing ceremony in Egypt. Munir, who is seen as the more influential Pakistani leader, has met twice with Trump this year and is expected to visit the White House a third time to discuss Gaza.

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 20:05

Fauci & Collins Brushed Off 'Impressive' Data For COVID Natural Immunity

Newly released emails reveal that senior Biden administration health officials privately grappling with research suggesting recovery from Covid-19 infection provided stronger protection than vaccination alone - at the very moment the federal government was preparing sweeping vaccine mandates in 2021.

(from l) Bill Gates, former NIH director Dr. Francis Collins and former NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The correspondence, released under the Freedom of Information Act to the watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust and shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation, offers the clearest documentary evidence to date that top officials recognized scientific uncertainties around one-size-fits-all vaccination policies, even as they publicly dismissed the value of natural immunity.

At the center of the internal debate was a massive Israeli study of nearly 800,000 people that found prior infection conferred substantially stronger protection against reinfection than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. In private emails, Dr. Anthony Fauci described the findings as “rather impressive,” acknowledging both the scale and rigor of the research, which had received prominent coverage in Science.

"The data [in the Israeli study] as reported in the news article look rather impressive . . . . but I would imagine that it is more complicated than we think . . . . [I]t is conceivable and possibly likely that those who have had a serious systemic infection develop a high level of immunity that even surpasses that of full vaccination," Fauci wrote in an Aug. 27, 2021 email with the subject line "RE: Post infection protection vs vaccine immunity."

Yet the same emails reveal officials’ concern that such findings could undermine the administration’s push for universal vaccination - and later, mandates - by complicating public messaging.

The documents lend new weight to claims made over the past four years by critics inside and outside government that federal agencies sidelined natural immunity not because of weak evidence, but because it was administratively inconvenient. Verifying prior infection, several officials suggested, would make policy enforcement harder and public guidance less uniform.

Acknowledging the Evidence - Privately

In exchanges with colleagues that included the surgeon general, the NIH director, and the CDC director, Fauci weighed the Israeli data against a far smaller CDC study of a few hundred Kentuckians. That CDC analysis, published in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, suggested vaccination after infection reduced reinfection risk more than infection alone. As Just the News points out, "The Biden administration often used MMWR, also not peer-reviewed, to push weak research that justified its policies."

The contrast was stark. The Israeli research - though a preprint at the time - showed natural immunity was many times more protective against reinfection and symptomatic disease. Fauci conceded the Israeli work was compelling, even while noting its retrospective design and voluntary testing.

He also speculated that the strength of natural immunity likely varied with illness severity, suggesting that recovery from “serious systemic infection” might offer better protection than vaccination - an assessment that ran counter to the administration’s public insistence that vaccination was superior across the board.

Bureaucracy Over Nuance

The emails echo statements later made by Paul Offit, a pediatrician and longtime FDA vaccine adviser, who admitted on a podcast four years ago that senior officials discussed - but ultimately rejected - recognizing natural immunity as a basis for exemption from vaccine mandates. According to Offit, the group broadly agreed that prior infection mattered immunologically. The obstacle, he said, was bureaucratic: how to document it.

NEW FOIA'd documents show that Fauci privately acknowledged "impressive" data showed natural immunity was more protective than COVID vaccines even as the Biden admin implemented mandates in 2021.

Privately officials acknowledged the strength of a study of 770,000+ people showing… pic.twitter.com/NeklY4t9GT

— Emily Kopp (@emilyakopp) January 14, 2026

Offit has since criticized aspects of the administration’s Covid vaccine strategy, including booster recommendations for low-risk groups and what he described as selective data-sharing with advisory committees. His term on a key FDA vaccine panel was not extended in 2022.

While the pediatrician and vaccine inventor told Just the News the meeting's importance had been exaggerated, Offit elaborated after the 2024 election on the 2021 meeting's details, telling the same podcast "we all basically agreed" on an exemption but "the question was, bureaucratically," how to verify natural immunity.

He also said Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told him at a 2023 meeting that the feds didn't target "high-risk groups" for vaccination because that was too "nuanced" and some at high risk wouldn't get jabbed unless everyone was told to do it. -Just the News

The newly released records also show senior officials struggling to reconcile conflicting data while preparing talking points to counter claims that vaccines were unnecessary for those already infected. In one email, CDC Covid response medical officer John Brooks summarized the state of the science: both infection and vaccination induce immunity; infection-derived protection appeared more durable; but infection carried higher risks and vaccination was “safe.”

Dr. John Brooks, CDC Chief Medical Officer, told a US Senate investigation that when the @CDC recommended cloth masks on March 31, 2020, the evidence in favor was "iron clad."

Implication: the CDC ignored the RCTs & never followed evidence-based medicine principles. pic.twitter.com/RboW68NbsB

— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) January 16, 2024

Still, Brooks acknowledged that some of the data supporting boosters were thin - one cited study involved only four subjects - and that the CDC lacked a comprehensive meta-analysis comparing infection- and vaccine-induced immunity.

Messaging vs. Evidence

Francis Collins, then director of the NIH, privately described the Israeli natural-immunity findings as “somewhat puzzling,” precisely because the study appeared well designed. He asked colleagues whether the CDC had synthesized all available evidence, noting that officials had repeatedly told the public vaccines provided better protection.

"Does CDC have a ready meta-analysis of all of the studies that have compared the immunity from natural infection to vaccination?" Collins asked. "Most of us have been saying up until now that vaccines are actually better for providing immunity – what does the overall synthesis of the data now say?"

As JTN notes further, those private doubts contrasted sharply with Collins’s earlier public posture, particularly his aggressive dismissal of the Great Barrington Declaration, whose authors argued for focused protection rather than universal restrictions and mandates. In the emails, Collins appeared far more circumspect, seeking nuance rather than certainty.

Protect the Public’s Trust has accused the CDC of misrepresenting its own Kentucky study, noting that agency press materials blurred the distinction between vaccination after infection and vaccination versus infection alone. The group filed a formal scientific-integrity complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services over what it called misleading public claims.

Michael Chamberlain, the organization’s director, told the Daily Caller that the emails show officials attempting to “bury what didn’t fit their preferred narrative,” even as Americans relied on foreign research for answers to basic questions about Covid immunity.

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 19:40

Trump Says 'Agitators' In Minnesota Church Should Be Jailed, Wants Broader Investigation

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President Donald Trump said that people who stormed a Minneapolis church over the past weekend should be jailed, while calling on the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate two local Democratic politicians.

President Donald Trump speaks during the "Great, Historic Investment in Rural Health Roundtable" in the East Room of the White House on Jan. 16, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

“Just watched footage of the Church Raid in Minnesota by the agitators and insurrectionists. These people are professionals! No person acts the way they act,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on early Tuesday.

The individuals who appeared at the church “are highly trained to scream, rant, and rave, like lunatics, in a certain manner, just like they are doing. They are troublemakers who should be thrown in jail, or thrown out of the Country.”

A livestreamed video posted on the Facebook page of Black Lives Matter Minnesota, one of the protest’s organizers, shows a group of people interrupting services at the Cities Church in St. Paul by chanting “ICE out,” referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and “Justice for Renee Good,” a protester who was shot in Minnesota by an ICE agent as she hit him with her car while trying to escape custody. The protesters allege that one of the church’s pastors also leads the local ICE field office overseeing some operations in the Twin Cities area.

Responding to the church incident, DOJ Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said the department is investigating federal civil rights violations who she said were “desecrating a house of worship and interfering with Christian worshippers.”

“A house of worship is not a public forum for your protest! It is a space protected from exactly such acts by federal criminal and civil laws!” she wrote in a post on social media.

Dhillon said in an interview with the Daily Wire that DOJ prosecutors went to Minneapolis on Monday to investigate the church case, suggesting that the protesters were violating the rights of the church-goers.

“You can have your protest in a park, you can have a march, you can get a permit for a large gathering, but you can’t just go wherever you want and tear things up and disrupt,” she told the outlet. “And that’s what these people did. And so now, people are afraid to go to church. And that is an absolute disgrace in this country.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi has also written that any violations of federal law would be prosecuted by the department.

In his social media post, Trump also took aim at Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), calling on the DOJ to investigate both in response to the recent unrest in Minnesota.

Both Walz and Omar have been critical of the Trump administration’s operation targeting illegal immigration in Minnesota, with Omar saying last week that the Twin Cities area is “under attack” by the federal government.

“There is no modern precedent for this level of federal overreach, violence, and lawlessness carried out in the name of immigration enforcement,” she said.

Walz also said that he believes Trump is seeking “violence in the streets” with the federal operation, adding that “Minnesota will remain an island of decency, of justice, of community, and of peace.” He then said, “Don’t give him what he wants.”

The Epoch Times contacted Walz’s and Omar’s offices for comment on Tuesday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 19:15

"Extraordinary Times": Ted Cruz Predicts Iran, Venezuela, & Cuba Could All Fall Within Six Months

The world may be approaching a turning point not seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union. At least, that’s what Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) predicts. Appearing on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo, Cruz said the globe is on the brink of a historic realignment, predicting that three long-standing anti-American regimes could collapse in a matter of months—a shift with worldwide implications. 

And it could arrive far sooner than many expect.

“We are living in extraordinary times,” Cruz said, arguing that the pace of global change “exceeds anything we have seen in decades.”

According to Cruz, the unrest now gripping Iran could soon extend far beyond its borders.

“There is a very real possibility that in the next six months the regimes in Iran, in Venezuela, and Cuba will all fall,” he said. 

Cruz went further, suggesting those nations could soon choose a dramatically different path.

“There is a real possibility that Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba will all democratically elect new leaders.”

He framed the moment as one with sweeping consequences for the United States and the world.

“Instead of fomenting violence, fomenting attacks on America, instead of waging war on America, there is a real chance in the next six months that the people of those three countries will elect leaders who embrace freedom and free enterprise and who want to stand with America,” he said.

If that happens, Cruz added, “it is difficult to think of anything more consequential,” comparing the potential shift to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.

The Texas senator laid much of the blame for global instability squarely on Tehran, calling Iran “the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism.”

He pointed to its financial backing of terror groups, saying, “They have paid for and funded… 90 percent of the funding of Hamas comes from Iran, 90 percent of the funding for Hezbollah comes from Iran.” Cruz also noted that Iran has sent terrorists abroad, “including sending terrorists to, among other places, Venezuela, and targeting Americans.”

He also credited President Trump for his support for the people of Iran and highlighted what he called a decisive escalation from the White House in recent days.

“In the last two days, a really important step occurred where President Trump came out unequivocally and said, ‘It is time for new leadership in Iran,’” Cruz said. He continued, quoting the president’s words directly: “It is time for the Ayatollah Khomeini, his religious dictatorship to end.” Cruz called that statement “massively important.”

When Bartiromo pressed him on whether the United States should take direct action, Cruz argued that Washington should pursue maximum pressure with the explicit goal of toppling the Iranian regime. He said the regime openly defines itself by hatred of the United States, pointing to the Ayatollah’s routine participation in “Death to America” chants and to the fact that Iran even commemorates the 1979 U.S. embassy takeover with an annual “Death to America Day.”

Cruz also backed President Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, saying the president concluded the risk of allowing a theocratic dictatorship to obtain nuclear weapons was intolerable. In Cruz’s view, the strike represented the most consequential foreign policy move of Trump’s second term. He contrasted that approach with the Obama administration’s response to Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution, when widespread protests were met with American restraint. Cruz said the United States squandered that moment by refusing to stand firmly with the Iranian people. This time, he argued, Trump has sent a clear message to Tehran that violently suppressing protesters will carry serious consequences.

Today, exclusively on @SundayFutures with @MariaBartiromo, Texas Senator Ted Cruz @tedcruz @SenTedCruz spoke about Iranians fighting for freedom against Khamenei's regime. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/QMwsF5JtRy

— SundayMorningFutures (@SundayFutures) January 18, 2026

Reagan won the Cold War by refusing to treat communist dictators as moral equals worthy of endless dialogue. Trump applies that same principle to Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba—regimes that have survived for decades solely because the establishment lacked the courage to finish them off. 

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 18:50

Democrats Are Trying To Weaponize The 25th Amendment Again, And It Won't Work

After spending nearly four years pretending that Joe Biden was fit for office, congressional Democrats are now calling for President Trump to be removed from office under the 25th Amendment after he linked his pursuit of Greenland to being snubbed for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.

In that text, sent Sunday, Trump told the Norwegian leader he no longer felt obligated to "think purely of Peace" after his country decided not to award him the prize for having stopped or prevented at least eight wars.

Invoke the 25th Amendment. pic.twitter.com/hGtiluTGiG

— Ed Markey (@SenMarkey) January 19, 2026

25 pic.twitter.com/zgDAZVm5rj

— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) January 19, 2026

The president of the United States is extremely mentally ill and it’s putting all of our lives at risk. The 25th Amendment exists for a reason—we need to invoke it immediately. pic.twitter.com/HaywXdWxDK

— Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari (@RepYassAnsari) January 19, 2026

Removing Trump under the 25th Amendment would require Vice President Vance and a majority of Cabinet members to declare to Congress that the president cannot discharge his duties. Congress would then have 21 days to ratify the decision, but two-thirds majorities in both the Senate and House would be needed to affirm removal. The mechanics make clear why this is political theater rather than serious governance. Vance and Trump's Cabinet are not going to declare him unfit over a text message. 

But the real problem is that it’s impossible to take any of these Democrats seriously on this issue. Democrats have played this card repeatedly for years, turning what should be a serious constitutional matter into a tired old political stunt. 

Once Trump took office in 2017, Democrats and their media allies pushed baseless narratives about cognitive decline. They called for mental assessments. They amplified armchair diagnoses from partisan psychiatrists. They did all this despite zero evidence of actual impairment. The noise grew so loud that Trump requested a cognitive assessment from his physician a year into his presidency. He aced it, but his critics were not satisfied.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe claimed that Justice Department officials briefly discussed invoking the 25th Amendment mere months into his first term after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017. 

The media routinely gave airtime to mental health professionals willing to claim Trump was certifiably unfit. Democrats even got 350 health professionals to sign a petition declaring his mental health was deteriorating. 

Weeks before the 2020 election, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi publicly questioned President Trump’s fitness to serve and unveiled legislation to establish a commission that would allow Congress to intervene under the 25th Amendment and strip the president of executive authority—citing a “strange tweet” from Trump as justification. 

While questioning Trump’s mental fitness was a constant theme during his first term, Democrats routinely ignored or denied Joe Biden’s cognitive decline during his presidency until Biden was forced to drop out of the 2024 presidential race after a humiliating debate performance against Trump that June. Up until that point, the media was largely defending Joe Biden from accusations of cognitive impairment.

In March 2024, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough insisted that Joe Biden was at the top of his game.

“I've said it for years now: he's cogent,” he insisted. “But I undersold him when I said he was cogent. He's far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he's better than he's ever been intellectually, analytically. Because he’s been around for 50 years.”

He added, “Start your tape right now, because I'm about to tell you the truth. And eff you if you can't handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second. And I've known him for years. The Brzezinskis have known him for 50 years. If it weren't the truth, I wouldn't say it.”

Joe Scarborough goes full state TV:

"Biden is far beyond cogent. He is better than he has EVER been intellectually, analytically. He is the best Biden ever."

pic.twitter.com/QxgYVINQrV

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 6, 2024

Many elected Democrats also publicly defended Joe Biden during his presidency, only to admit after the election that he was clearly impaired.

Democrats spent years crying wolf about Trump's mental state. They fabricated crises where none existed. Then they ignored the actual cognitive decline of their own president out of political necessity. 

Democrats have weaponized the 25th Amendment just like they’ve weaponized impeachment. Now they expect the public to take seriously another claim that Trump is unfit for office?

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 18:05

Maybe It's Time For Conservative Patriots To Rally In Minneapolis

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us

For years we knew it was coming: Civil War 2.0. It’s not as if the establishment has been subtle about their intentions to erase conservatives and liberty minded people from the American epoch. I remember during the Obama years, the narrative was repeated daily that conservatives are a “backwards remnant” of the old America that needs to adapt to the times or fade into obscurity.

The reasoning was that, slowly but surely, the US was becoming “more diverse” and therefore the progressive left was going to be the dominant political force for generations to come (because they think they own all minorities).

In other words, multiculturalism was the new ideological standard.

In order for conservatives to survive, we would have to become more like leftists, embrace DEI, and abandon the principles of western civilization that originally made America great.

But then, something happened that leftists and the establishment elites apparently did not expect; a groundswell of patriotism, a renewed reverence for the ideals of meritocracy and reason, a rising movement of moral clarity. The progressives and globalists did not understand that the conservative populism they categorized as “fringe” 10 years earlier was becoming a mainstay of digital discourse.

They thought they had won. They thought they had us after Obama, so much so that they ran Hillary Clinton for president with the assumption that she could not lose. Then, they thought they had us during the pandemic, but they failed to secure a lasting medical tyranny. They thought they had us during the Biden regime by flooding the country will third world migrants.

Now, they think they have us with their NGO paid army of activists, agitators and provocateurs. They think they have use with the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Everything they do is built on the assumption that we will do nothing.

They think this because it is exceedingly rare for conservatives to step outside the traditional bounds of law and order. We have a tendency to wait for people in authority to fix our problems. We have a tendency to rely on civil discourse to ease tensions and find common ground. And, we have a tendency to wait for elections in the hope that the other side will simply accept our victory and recognize that most of the country is against them.

This is clearly not going to happen.

First, because leftists always double down. They are ideological zealots who thirst for power and they will do anything to achieve it. Morals and logic hold no value for them. They will ignore the results of the elections and they will ignore the will of the people because they think THEY know better than everyone else.

Second, globalist NGOs continue to fund and train these activists in greater and greater numbers. I have heard it argued that we need to “stop calling the activists paid protesters” because this diminishes the fact that they are crazed ideologues and true believers. I disagree.

Yes, they are lunatics. Yes, they are true believers. But they would not be able to sustain their mob actions without the steady aid of NGOs feeding them cash, legal help and training. These people are taking their orders from someone; they are not an organic movement.

In past articles I have tried to plead with conservatives to recognize that these activists are NOT sincere fellow citizens engaging in legitimate protest. They are a mercenary army paid to go to war. I’ll say it once again: WE ARE AT WAR. We need to start acting like it.

The organization of conservative movements is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks on the planet. And to be clear, I’ve tried it on a small scale in the past and it’s not easy to get conservatives to commit. That said, I’m not a joiner either and if I do something I usually prefer to do it alone. I suspect most conservatives are the same and I understand the reasons why getting patriots to show up en masse is like herding cats.

Conservatives have lives, we have families (families we actually care about), we have real jobs and most of us don’t see civil protest as a “career”. We also have a tendency to distrust anyone trying too hard to organize. We are, for lack of a better word, paranoid.

Then there’s the people I would call “crabs in a bucket”. The fake conservatives, the fraud influencers, the big talkers who have found their niche grifting in the name of patriotism. But when the moment comes that action and risk are required, they try to pull everyone back down into the bucket of apathy.

They cry that “this is what the leftists want.” They spread rumors of “false flags” to convince people not to get off their couches and walk out the door. What if this is “just another J6”, they argue every time the idea of organization arises. They’ll say our job as civilians is to vote, and then wait for the authorities to handle it.

To be sure, there have been examples in the past of patriots being misled, and I’m certainly a believer in informed caution, but these guys can’t seem to find a conflict they won’t run away from. At this stage all I see are people trying to mislead us into doing nothing while liberty speakers are assassinated, counter protesters are physically attacked, and common sense policies are sabotaged by a handful of corrupt politicians, judges and militant activists.

When there are no consequences for bad behavior, bad behavior will escalate into violence and chaos. It’s important to understand that the political left is made up largely of people who are emotionally stunted. They are toddlers trapped in adult bodies. And, like spoiled children, they act the way they do because they have never been spanked.

Then there’s the people behind the curtain. The NGOs who use obscure and often anonymous online recruitment programs to find and train the useful idiots. Most of their offices are safely nestled in blue havens like New York City or Washington D.C. They are protected by corporate personhood laws and can essentially do whatever they please while enjoying limited liability and the same civil rights as individual citizens.

They WANT Trump to deploy troops to places like Minneapolis. They want their useful idiot activists to get their asses kicked by federal agents on camera. They want some of these people to die because then they can say: “See, we told you Trump is a fascist! Rise up against your oppressor!” They want a communist-style revolution motivated by the fantasy that leftists are “freedom fighters” against a government tyranny that does not represent the American public.

The Trump Administration is legally restricted in what it can do when it comes to investigating or dissolving NGOs. That’s why these institutions are so useful to leftists and globalists.

Our only recourse, in my opinion, is for patriots to organize and act to remove the threat these groups present. Trump has to adhere to the boundaries of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights…but we don’t. The constitution restricts government enforcement, it doesn’t restrict us. The political left ignores our rights, so why should we respect theirs?

The activist mobs in Minneapolis have reverted to pure terrorism. They are physically beating counter-protesters for simply showing up. It’s only a matter of time before they kill someone. Meanwhile, local law enforcement is doing nothing because they have been told by Democrats to do nothing.

Leftists are setting up checkpoints and harassing residents. They are invading peaceful churches with the intent to cause fear among local Christians. They attack ICE agents at every opportunity; men who are merely carrying out the policies WE voted for in 2024.

The political left is trying to subvert the mandate of American voters. They refuse to accept that they lost and they are executing a guerrilla war instead. It’s time for conservatives to step up and do something about it; not just wait for Trump to repair the damage. Maybe Trump deploys troops to Minneapolis, and maybe the activists disperse (maybe not), but they will inevitably pop up elsewhere and we need to be ready.

Conservative groups can set up their own funding structures. We can help to pay expenses for patriots traveling to stop these NGO activists from wreaking havoc. We can train people. We can field an army just as easily as the political left (if not more so).

I’m not much of an organizer, and I certainly don’t want to handle other people’s money. But I believe there are many conservatives out there with far bigger platforms than I have who could take on this role (just watch out for potential grifters, you don’t want a BLM situation where some guy buys three mansions with your donations). The bottom line is, we can do what leftists do and do it better. Anyone who wants to talk more about this can contact me at: brandon@alt-market.com

What I pledge is that I will be there, at the front of the line, to face off against the leftist mob. I will drive from Montana to Minnesota (or anywhere else) and will happily meet with caravans of patriots on the way. With my self defense background I can help train counter-protesters to fight back if needed. With my extensive radio experience I can help to set up secure communications. I will do whatever I’m able.  If we do this, let’s get prepared and let’s do it right.

I think there are millions of conservatives out there who feel the same way I do. We are fed up. Our capacity for diplomacy has been exhausted.

Very few people want to say it out loud and maybe they’re afraid to say it, but we’re all thinking it. Now is the time to act. Wherever the leftist mob shows up to create chaos, we should show up and drive them out of the city. This is the risk we must take if we ever want peace in our country again.

Or, we can continue sitting on our laptops and phones waiting for the problem to fix itself while the activist mob spreads across the entire country, fully emboldened by our lack of resolve.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 17:45

Lululemon Yanks Leggings Over "See-Through" Concerns When Bending Over

Lululemon Athletica yanked its new Get Low training apparel line from its North America e-commerce website just days after launch, following customer complaints that the leggings were see-through.

"The Get Low line has officially been pulled. The leggings are absolutely see-through when you squat or bend over (in every colorway). You can bring them into any store and trade them for a different legging even if they have been worn, FYI. They didn't pull them from stores, so I don't know what Lululemon is thinking. The tops are great, in my opinion," a viral post on the r/lululemon subreddit stated two days ago.

A spokesperson for Lululemon Athletica told Bloomberg that the entire "collection remains available in our stores in North America, but we have temporarily paused sales online in the market to better understand some initial guest feedback and support with product education."

"We expect to bring the collection back to our North America e-commerce channels soon, and the collection continues to be available in other markets," Lululemon said.

JPMorgan analyst Matthew Boss told clients that the Get Low training apparel was removed from the company's website just three days after its debut. He said complaints on social media were mostly centered on the tights, with customers describing them as "not squat proof."

Shares of LULU were down more than 5% in late afternoon trading on Tuesday. This is not Lululemon's first product debut fumble. In 2013, the company was forced to recall large amounts of its black yoga pants after customers complained that the leggings were see-through.

 

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 17:25

The Reckoning On Immigration Is Here

Authored by Alex Berenson via Unreported Truths,

The easy part is over.

Americans wanted the borders closed.

For decades, the legacy media and politicians in both parties ignored that wish, claiming the United States had to accept and support an endless flood of illegal migrants. The disconnect between average people and elite opinion was so obvious that academics wrote papers about it.

President Trump broke with the elite consensus from the first day of his 2016 presidential campaign, when he announced “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border.” No issue proved more politically potent for him.

In his second term, Trump has kept his promise. The wall may not be literally complete, but it might as well be. Customs and Border Patrol reports monthly “encounters” with illegal migrants on the southern border have fallen about 95 percent from the Biden Administration average, and 97 percent from their 2023 peak.

But closing the border to new arrivals does not undo the fact that tens of millions of people are living in the United States illegally, or with quasi-legal “asylum” or “temporary protected” status the Trump Administration is now seeking to revoke.

Just how many people are inside the United States illegally? We do not really know. In 2024, the Department of Homeland Security put the figure at roughly 11 million in 2022 — and said the number had not changed for almost 20 years.

That estimate is nonsensical, given that close to 10 million people arrived in the first three years of the Biden Administration alone.

In 2018, in a paper that should have received more attention than it did, three researchers from Yale and MIT estimated about 22 million people — double the official figure — were living illegally in the United States.

As the paper explained, the consensus 11 million figure comes from a census question that “requires accurate responses from survey respondents when asked where they were born, and whether they are American citizens.” In other words, the survey required illegal immigrants to tell on themselves — to government officials. (It’s a surprise the figure was not zero.)

The researchers used a different method, netting out changes in immigration over time by estimating the number of migrants entering, leaving, and dying. To be clear, this was an exercise in modeling, with all the uncertainty that implies. But even a modeled figure is better than a clearly nonsensical one.

Their best estimate was that the number of illegal migrants rose from under 5 million in 1990 to about 22 million before the 2008 financial crisis, then stayed roughly flat for the next decade. This growth makes intuitive sense. The American economy was very strong in the 1990s, and making money is the primary reason people uproot their lives and cross borders.

—

(The 2018 Yale estimate of illegal immigrants in the United States. Note the black line hovering just over 20 million.)

The prolonged recession and slow recovery from the 2008 financial crisis kept a lid on illegal migration for the next several years.

Then three factors combined to drive up migration.

Economic growth accelerated in President Trump’s first term.

Leaders in the Democratic Party began to speak out aggressively against any enforcement of border laws.

And migrants realized they could use asylum claims to gain entry into the United States and become quickly eligible for Medicaid and other public benefits programs, which previously had not been available to them. The number of people claiming asylum rose from 44,000 in 2011 to 209,000 in 2017, according to a State Department report to Congress.

When the Biden Administration took over in 2021, these trends exploded.

Covid lockdowns and plunging tourism devastated Latin American economies, making the United States more attractive. The official 2020 Democratic Party platform essentially called for an end to border enforcement. And requests for asylum surged even further, with almost 480,000 people asking for asylum in 2023 — even as the Biden Administration created other new pathways to admission, like the “Humanitarian Parole Program.”

—

Millions more people simply came across the border without even the fig leaf of an asylum request or humanitarian parole. In 2024, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that about 65 percent of all the migrants in the post-2020 surge — roughly five to six million people — fell in that category.

At an minimum, the United States now probably has close to 20 million people inside its borders who have no legal right to be here under any circumstance. The number may well be closer to 30 million, especially as the Trump Administration strips away the Biden Administration’s expansion of asylum and “humanitarian parole.”

Many of those people are hardworking migrants whose only crime is their immigration status. Others have depended on public assistance since the day they arrived on American soil and have no plans to or realistic hope of getting off it. And some — a small but still real percentage — are criminals.

But they are all present illegally and thus face the risk of deportation. Until now, that risk had been largely theoretical. The United States had operated under a fragile don’t-ask-don’t-tell-style consensus on deportation, which was more or less as follows:

If you can get across the border and you work and do not commit crimes, you will not face a serious risk of immigration enforcement or deportation. And if you have children here, they will be American citizens, under birthright citizenship.

To be clear, the left — not the right — destabilized this bargain.

Opening taxpayer-financed programs to millions of asylees, refugees, and other immigrants with quasi-legal status infuriated many native-born Americans. In combination with the sheer number of new arrivals, the welfare expansion understandably led to an angry backlash.

Now the Trump Administration has made clear that in its view closing the border was the first step, not the last, in immigration enforcement, and that the United States should view the presence of tens of millions of illegal migrants as a mass violation of its laws and sovereignty, even if they are committing no other crimes.

We are about to find out whether most Americans agree.

The easy part — closing the borders — is over.

The hard part — deciding what to do about the people who are already here — comes now.

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 17:05

Leftists Call For Political Purge Of MAGA If They Return To Power

You might have thought it wasn't possible, but leftist activist rhetoric has become even more unhinged than usual in the past month as ICE agents try to do their lawful jobs in Democrat controlled sanctuary cities like Minneapolis. 

During the Obama Administration, ICE carried out millions of deportations of illegal aliens without a peep from progressives.  Suddenly, under Trump these same operations are now being called "fascism" and grounds for insurgency.  The reason these arrests have led to more violence today is not because of ICE, it is because NGO paid and trained activists are getting in the way.

First, impeding law enforcement officials, blocking roads, sabotaging vehicles and physically assaulting agents is not a legal form of protest. 

Second, the American public voted for mass deportations to happen; not just for migrants who break the law after they sneak into the US, but for all migrants who sneak into the US.  Democrats and a radical minority of activists are therefore attempting to disrupt the democratic process and prevent the Trump Administration from carrying out the will of the people.

But it doesn't stop there. 

A narrative is building among Democrat politicians and NGO activists alike which is essentially calling for a political purge of conservatives if progressive leaders return to government power in the next few years.  Multiple blue city mayors, governors and police administrators have already threatened to "arrest ICE agents" for carrying out deportations within sanctuary city jurisdictions. 

Jacob Frey and Tim Walz made thinly veiled threats suggesting that local police could intervene.  Walz called on residents of Minneapolis to film all ICE agents so that they could be "prosecuted later."       

Jacob Frey says residents are calling on Minneapolis police to fight ICE agents.

Watch the police chief’s face when he says this.pic.twitter.com/fwHVCTsxd7

— Breanna Morello (@BreannaMorello) January 15, 2026

These speeches echo sentiments of leftists on social media calling for a Stasi-like purge if Democrats get back control of Congress and the White House.  They assert that ICE agents can be identified and later imprisoned for enforcing basic immigration laws, even if their deportation arrests were legal and constitutional at the time.

TIM WALZ: "If you see these ICE agents in your neighborhood, take out that phone and hit record."

"Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution." pic.twitter.com/V7fCMY3WZ1

— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 15, 2026

The Trump Administration and ICE have responded, asserting that such actions would constitute an insurrection.  In other words, blue cities would be at war with the federal government.  

Philadelphia “Sheriff” @PhilaSheriff Rochelle Bilal should resign before she embarrasses herself any further.

“Arresting ICE officers”?

Try it. See what happens. pic.twitter.com/IZgvHN9RyV

— U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (@ICEgov) January 10, 2026

The insanity of leftists, however, is not to be taken lightly.  Activist influencers want Trump and anyone associated with him thrown in the gulag.  They are even suggesting that they can drag Trump and his allies before a tribunal and Democrats will "find the crimes" they are guilty of.  As Lavrentiy Beria, head of Stalin's secret police in the Soviet Union allegedly stated:

"Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime..."

Ex-CNN host Jim Acosta and Democrat podcaster Jennifer Welch recently agreed that the left needs to take revenge on President Donald Trump.  Not just by winning elections, but by putting him in prison for winning his election.

WEAPONIZATION: Democrat activists Jennifer Welch and Jim Acosta say mass prosecutions of Trump and Republicans would be necessary for national reconciliation when Democrats regain power, arguing that expanding the SCOTUS would be required to jail Trump. pic.twitter.com/0a8hfU9qiq

— @amuse (@amuse) January 17, 2026

Elon Musk took to X and posted a warning to conservatives in response to the clip, stating: "They mean it." 

This is not a new tactic for Democrats.  They attempted to jail Trump a number of times on fabricated charges in order to prevent him from running for office in 2024.  They imprisoned around 1270 J6 protesters for an insurrection that never happened in order to make an example.  They went after Trump's political allies with arrests and lawsuits. They tried to bury Musk with investigations and red tape.  All of this was designed to undermine any chance of conservatives regaining a presence in government.  

Without a doubt, if Democrats somehow steal the kind of power they once had during the Biden Administration, they will take action to ensure no one is able to take it from them again.  Or, they will start a civil war in the process.

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 16:45

Netflix Craters On Disappointing Guidance, Stock Buyback Pause

It was already an ugly quarter for NFLX shareholders who have been caught in a painful takeover battle for Warner Bros Discovery which has hammered the stock. And it only got uglier moments ago when Netflix reported Q4 earnings which came in solid, along with record subscribers for 2025, but it was the company's disappointing guidance due to higher program spending, together with the halt of stock buybacks (to fund the pending WBD deal) that slammed the stock to levels last seen during the Liberation day panic. 

Here is what NFLX reported for Q4 results: 

• EPS 56c vs. 43c y/y, beating estimates of 55c
   
• Revenue $12.05 billion, +18% y/y, beating estimates $11.97 billion
  • US & Canada revenue $5.34 billion, +18% y/y, beating estimates $5.26 billion
  • EMEA revenue $3.87 billion, +18% y/y, beating estimate $3.84 billion
  • Latin America revenue $1.42 billion, +15% y/y, matching estimate $1.42 billion
  • APAC revenue $1.42 billion, +17% y/y, missing estimate $1.44 billion
     
• Operating income $2.96 billion, +30% y/y, beating estimate of $2.89 billion
   
• Operating margin 24.5% vs. 22.2% y/y, beating estimate of 24.2%
• Cash flow from operations $2.11 billion, +37% y/y, beating estimate of $1.68 billion
• Free cash flow $1.87 billion, +36% y/y, beating estimates $1.46 billion

So far so good, because absent a small miss on APAC revenue, the quarter was generally in line (as a reminder, Netflix stopped providing regular updates on its subscriber total, directing investors to focus on more traditional financial metrics).

Some more details on Q4 results:

Q4 revenue grew 18% year over year (+17% on a foreign exchange (F/X) neutral basis), driven primarily by membership growth, higher pricing, and increased ad revenue. Despite unfavorable F/X movements during the quarter, revenue was 1% above our guidance due to stronger-than-forecasted membership growth and ad sales. 

Operating income in Q4 was $3.0B, up 30% year over year, and operating margin expanded two percentage points year over year to 25% - both slightly ahead of our forecast due primarily to the revenue upside.

Diluted EPS amounted to $0.56 vs $0.43 in Q4’24 (+31% year over year), slightly above our forecast (adjusted for our 10-for-1 stock split). Net income included ~$60M of costs (booked in interest expense) related to our recent Warner Bros.-related bridge loan and associated bridge reduction financings (which was not included in our guidance). 

With our strong Q4 results, we met or exceeded all of our full year 2025 financial objectives. We grew revenue 16% to $45B (+17% on a F/X neutral basis) and we increased our operating margin to 29.5% for the year, up from 26.7% in 2024. We also made great progress growing advertising revenue. In 2025, which was only our third year selling advertising, ad revenue grew by more than 2.5x vs. 2024 to over $1.5 billion. 

The streaming leader said it plans to increase spending on films and TV shows by 10% in 2026 while forging ahead with plans to buy the studio and streaming business of Warner Bros., a deal that would unite two of the world’s largest entertainment companies. Netflix spent about $18 billion on programming last year, with subscribers growing almost 8% to top 325 million.

The strong subscriber metrics and results were to be expected in a quarter that had a particularly strong programming lineup to close the year, including the final episodes of Stranger Things, a documentary series about hip-hop mogul Sean Combs and a new Frankenstein film.

But while Q4 was solid, it was the company's forecast that was the first alert, with the company reporting revenue, operating income and margins all of which came below estimates.

• Sees EPS 76c, missing estimates of 82c.
• Sees revenue $12.16 billion, missing estimates of $12.17 billion
• Sees operating income $3.91 billion, missing estimates of $4.18 billion
• Sees operating margin 32.1%, missing estimates of 34.4%

Extending the forecast to the full year, there was more disappointment, because while revenue came in just barely higher than expected, both margin and free cash flow came in well below the median consensus.

• Sees revenue $50.7 billion to $51.7 billion, estimate $50.96 billion 
• Sees operating margin 31.5%, estimate 32.4%
• Sees free cash flow about $11 billion, estimate $11.93 billion

Some more details on the forecast from the investor letter, which suggests that the takeover of WB Discovery will weigh on the bottom line for some time, including an additional  $275 million  in acquisition-related expenses, on top of the $60 million already spent. 

For 2026, based on F/X rates as of 1/1/2026, we forecast revenue of $50.7B-$51.7B. This represents 12%-14% year over year growth (or 11%-13% F/X neutral growth), driven by increases in membership and pricing plus a projected rough doubling of ad revenue in 2026 vs. 2025. 

We’re targeting a 2026 operating margin of 31.5% (based on 1/1/26 F/X rates), up from 29.5% in 2025, which includes approximately $275M of acquisition-related expenses. Our margin forecast also reflects content amortization growth of ~10% in 2026, with higher growth in the first half than the second half due to the timing of title launches.

As a result, we expect higher operating income growth in the second half of 2026 than in the first half. We still see plenty of room to increase our margins and our intent is to grow our operating margin each year, although the magnitude of margin expansion will vary year-to-year as we balance reinvesting in our business with improving profitability.  

Summarizing the highlights from the guidance, the company sees higher operating income growth in H2 2026 vs H1; sees "plenty of room" to increase margin; the company intends to grow operating margin each year. NFLX sees about doubling of ad revenue in 2026 vs 2025.

Netflix is buying Warner Bros. to obtain one of the strongest film and TV libraries in the world, content it can mine for new material and help the company expand newer businesses like consumer products, experiences and video games. Last year’s programming budget delivered a marginal increase in viewership for Netflix, with overall engagement growing about 2% in the second half.

Yet even as growth in new users and viewing has slowed, Netflix has sustained double-digit sales growth by raising prices and introducing advertising. The company predicts ad sales will double this year from $1.5 billion in 2025.

And while investors were not delighted with some of the aspects,, the big hit to the stock after hours was news that Netflix would pause share buybacks to accumulate cash to help fund pending Warner Bros. acquisition.

This, together with the poor guidance, sent the stock tumbling 5%, and back to the lowest level since the April Liberation day. 

 

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 16:32

By The Numbers... Trump's (Second) First Year In 10 Charts

Authored by Emel Akan and Andrew Moran via The Epoch Times,

Trump’s policies have influenced everything from economic growth and stock market performance to gas prices and mortgage rates.

Stock Market Performance

Since President Trump took office in January 2025, stock indexes have reached new highs.

The S&P 500 Index rose nearly 16 percent through Jan. 14, compared to a 24 percent increase over the same period in Trump’s first term. In the past 12 months, the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased 13 percent and the Nasdaq gained 20 percent.

Economic Growth

After a 0.6 percent contraction in the first quarter, U.S. economic growth accelerated and exceeded economists’ expectations in 2025, avoiding a feared recession. GDP grew by 3.8 percent in Q2 and 4.3 percent in Q3—the strongest performance in two years.

Although official data for October 2025 through December 2025 are pending, the Atlanta Federal Reserve estimates growth at around 5 percent. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expects 2026 to be a “gangbuster year,” with continued strong economic growth.

Inflation

Inflation reached 9.1 percent in 2022, the highest level in decades. Although consumer prices remained elevated through 2025, inflation rates were lower than those recorded during the Biden administration.

The annual rate began 2025 at 3 percent, fell to 2.3 percent in April, and rose back to 3 percent five months later. In November and December, price pressures eased, with the 12-month rate slowing sharply to 2.7 percent thanks mainly to falling gas prices.

Trade

Despite the trade deficit widening in the first three months of 2025 as businesses rushed to front-run President Donald Trump’s global tariffs, America’s monthly trade balance has improved substantially.

Since peaking at $136 billion, the U.S. goods and trade deficit fell to $29 billion in October—the lowest level in 16 years.

Employment

Since last summer, the U.S. labor market has been characterized by what some economists call “low fire, low hire,” with companies neither reducing nor expanding their workforce.

In 2025, employers added 584,000 jobs in total, averaging 49,000 per month.

However, job growth slowed as government payrolls fell by 277,000, reflecting the administration’s efforts to shrink the federal government bureaucracy and support private sector jobs.

Gas Prices

One of the major achievements of the Trump administration has been the substantial decline in gas prices. From record production to loosening regulations, businesses and consumers have seen lower energy costs.

Crude oil prices are trading below $60, while two dozen states are enjoying average gasoline prices below $2.80 a gallon. Market watchers expect the same trends in the year ahead.

Mortgage Rates

When President Donald Trump started his second term at the White House, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was around 7 percent. Since then, it has fallen significantly, even temporarily sliding below 6 percent for the first time in more than three years.

This has been driven by a blend of falling Treasury yields and federal housing strategies to bring down costs.

Border Security

President Donald Trump has emphasized border security as a central policy priority. By securing the border, the United States has experienced a 93 percent reduction in border crossings, 622,000 deportations, and 1.9 million self-deportations.

This has been accomplished by bolstering enforcement personnel and tightening procedures.

Executive Actions

While the administration secured a major legislative victory with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, President Donald Trump has used the power of the executive branch to advance many of his policy objectives, including tariffs and regulations.

Some of the more than 220 signed executive orders have also drawn legal scrutiny from advocacy organizations, companies, and states, leading to battles that have reached the Supreme Court.

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 16:20

Trump's Long, Meandering Pre-Davos Presser: 'Things Are Going To Work Out Pretty Well'

Summary:

In what was a long and meandering speech, with no questions from the press taken till well over an hour in, President Trump's 'pre-Davos' press briefing varied greatly in terms of topics, themes, and emphasis. The president drifted between thoughts in a meandering, unscripted, and often tangential way - as he's been known to sometimes do. One of the strangest moments came when Trump joked about nearly injuring himself with a ring binder. "I wouldn’t have shown the pain," he said. Still, it felt so long that some commentators expressed that this briefing could have gone on indefinitely.

President Trump evades injury:

"I'm glad my finger wasn't in that sucker. That could've dome some damage but you know what? I wouldn't have shown the pain. Boy, did you hear that? That was nasty. But I would not have shown the pain."pic.twitter.com/G7BJIb6Rvz

— The American Conservative (@amconmag) January 20, 2026

Address came after flurry of late night Truth Social Posts

After a barrage of late-night Truth Social posts that greatly unsettled US allies, President Donald Trump struck a noticeably calmer tone during remarks in the White House press room. Still, the underlying tensions - especially on trade, NATO, and Greenland - remained unresolved as he prepared to travel to Davos.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking earlier in Davos, urged European leaders to show patience, but mounting pushback from foreign capitals suggests Trump may struggle to reassure allies when he arrives in Switzerland.

Greenland

Pressed repeatedly on Greenland, Trump remained confident - and vague: "I think things are going to work out pretty well." He described he has “a lot of meetings scheduled” on Greenland during his Davos trip.

When told that Greenlanders have made clear they do not want to be part of the U.S., Trump replied: "When I speak to Greenlanders I’m sure they are going to be thrilled." Asked how far he would go to acquire the territory, Trump responded simply: “You’ll find out.”

Trump seemed a little more conciliatory: "The United States and NATO will come to an agreement on the future of Greenland that will satisfy both sides" - as Reuters paraphrased it. "I think that we will work something out where NATO is going to be very happy and where we're going to be very happy, but we need it for security purposes," he stated.

On the legality of using tariffs to pressure countries over Greenland, Trump said that if the Supreme Court blocks him, he would pursue another route. “We’ll have to sue something else… what we’re doing now is the best, strongest, fastest, least complicated way.”

Relations with European Leaders

Trump emphasized that he maintains cordial relations with key European leaders, even after public criticism. He said he “gets along well” with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He described French President Emmanuel Macron as “a nice guy.”

Despite this, Trump confirmed he has not spoken with either leader since his Truth Social post criticizing the UK for “planning to give away the island of Diego Garcia,” which he called an act of “great stupidity.”

“They get a bit rough when I’m not around,” Trump said, adding that they treat him well when he is present.

On NATO

Trump once again framed NATO as heavily dependent on U.S. power and spending. “Whether you like it or not, Nato is only as good as we are.” Without the U.S., he said the alliance is “not very strong.”

He insisted no president has done more for NATO: “Nobody has done more for Nato than I have, in every way.”

Trump cited his role in pushing members toward spending up to 5% of GDP on defense and said allies are buying U.S. weapons and sending them to Ukraine. Still, he raised doubts about mutual defense: “I know we’ll come to their rescue, but I just really do question whether or not they’ll come to ours.”

Illegal Immigrants and ICE

Trump expressed rare sympathy for Renee Good, who was fatally shot by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis two weeks ago. “It’s a hard situation” and “That’s so sad,” he said.

He said he felt “terrible” upon learning her father was a “Trump fan.” Notably, Trump diverged from other administration officials by seeming to acknowledge possible misconduct in the incident: ICE will sometimes “make mistakes” and “be too rough with people.”

This contrasted sharply with earlier assertions from Vice President JD Vance and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who described Good as a domestic terrorist.

Throughout much of the event, he held up small posters or cards of criminal migrants - or what seemed 'wanted' type placards - and blamed the prior Biden administration for the surge of illegals and rise in criminality in places like Minneapolis and across the nation.

Economy, Inflation and Messaging

Trump defended his economic record but acknowledged it is not resonating with voters. He said he inherited a “terrible mess” from former President Joe Biden and called his turnaround a “miracle” and a “beautiful picture.” He said at one point, “Prices are coming way down.”

At the same time, Trump admitted his message is failing to land in some quarters: “I’m not getting, maybe I have the bad public relations people, but we’re not getting it across.”

He warned that economic dissatisfaction - particularly over housing, healthcare, and living costs - could hurt Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections.

Nobel Peace Prize

Trump revisited his long-standing frustration over not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, claiming geopolitical bias as “Norway controls the shots. It’s a joke.”

He said Venezuelan opposition figure María Machado told him he deserved the prize, not her: “President Trump deserves it — he ended eight wars.”

* * *

Trump is expected to appear at Tuesday’s White House press briefing to mark the one-year anniversary of the start of his second term.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt teased the surprise in a post on X, saying, "A very special guest will be joining me at the podium today.... TUNE IN.”

The rare appearance at the briefing podium comes as the president faces extraordinary pushback from America’s European allies over his planned tariffs over Greenland, tensions he’ll face in person this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Watch the full briefing here... "Brace!"

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 16:19

Goldman Exec Denies Plan To Oust Top Lawyer Over Epstein Revelations

A senior Goldman Sachs executive says rumors of a plan to oust general counsel and top adviser to CEO David Solomon, Kathryn Ruemmler, are "completely untrue," after recent document dumps from Jeffrey Epstein's estate revealed that she was far closer with him than previously known. 

Ruemmler - a former top legal advisor in the Obama administration - told Goldman execs when they hired her that her relationship with Epstein was purely professional and stemmed from her time as a white-collar defense attorney at Latham & Watkins. It would later become public that she not only met with Epstein dozens of times and exchanged friendly emails for years, she was listed as an executor of Epstein's will as recently as Jan. 18, 2019 - which had been removed before he died in prison on Aug. 10 of that year.

She was hired at Goldman in April 2020 as the bank's head of regulatory affairs. In November of that year, she was forced to give a heads up to Goldman execs when the Daily Beast published an article revealing she was in the courtroom at Epstein's 2019 arraignment. 

Her name also appears hundreds of times in a 500-page log of emails between Epstein and his lawyers that are still under seal because Epstein's estate has cited attorney-client privilege, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

In November, Congress released dozens of emails she had exchanged with Epstein, including some disparaging President Trump, that sparked a panic among some Goldman executives. 

“Trump is so gross,” Ruemmler wrote in a 2017 message with Epstein. He replied “worse in real life and upclose.” -WSJ

Goldman Panics

After an April 2023 report in the Journal detailing the more extensive connections between Ruemmler and Epstein - including how the two had "met dozens of times, that Epstein had visited apartments she was considering buying and that he offered assistance with her travel planning," including a 2017 plan to take her to 'pedo island,' bankers complained to senior management - pointing out that she had a role on the firm's reputational risk committee. The bankers were essentially told to stand down. 

Then, at a dinner organized at CEO David Solomon's Manhattan apartment in 2024, several women who attended told the Journal that they were appalled that Solomon had Ruemmler help organize the event. Solomon, at a later gathering with high-ranking women, complained that Ruemmler had garnered that kind of reaction - and couldn't believe that there were senior women at the firm who would bristle at her. Solomon told the WSJ in a statement that no women had ever raised concerns to him about Ruemmler's involvement in the dinner. 

Concern inside Goldman had picked up by spring 2025 as the public’s focus on releasing the Epstein files intensified. The Trump administration initially vowed to release everything and then pulled back. Some high up the ranks at Goldman thought the firm dodged a bullet, people familiar with the matter said. The relief was short-lived when the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Epstein estate in August.

In September, the House committee released the Jan. 18, 2019, version of Epstein’s will that listed Ruemmler as a backup executor. 

Her presence on the will had been discovered by some at Goldman as far back as 2023 when an external lawyer informed a Goldman executive, people familiar with the matter said. -WSJ

Ouster in the Works?

According to the new report, Goldman exec John Rogers - who brought Ruemmler into the bank, reportedly told close associates he was formulating a contingency plan for her exit later this year, according to people familiar with the matter. The idea would be to let her save face with as graceful an exit as possible. 

When asked about it, Rogers told the outlet "That is completely untrue." Another person familiar with the matter said that Solomon hasn't been involved with the plan. 

Ruemmler, meanwhile, doubled down on her assertion that she kept things professional, telling the Journal that her association with Epstein was from when "it was my job to engage with people and companies that had serious legal and public relations problems. Many were under criminal investigation, and many had been convicted of crimes."

She also insists that she never represented Epstein or advocated on her behalf, despite Epstein texting an unknown individual with "what Kathy suggests we tell Waco" (later corrected to WaPo, as in the Washington Post). 

Epstein also told some of his lawyers in 2019 that Ruemmler, a former federal prosecutor, could be a valuable asset to his legal defense. Some on his team discussed asking her to prepare a character witness letter for a bail hearing - as well as she, among other female lawyers under consideration, could cross-examine some of Epstein's accusers, people familiar with the matter told the Journal. 

Ruemmler denied this, telling the outlet that she never drafted a letter, nor was she asked to cross-examine victims. 

Goldman spox Tony Fratto also told the Journal: "Before she accepted the offer to join Goldman Sachs, she proactively disclosed her association with Jeffrey Epstein and other high-profile clients and contacts who might attract media attention, so that the firm would be aware of them. The firm did its own diligence and was satisfied. Nobody involved in Kathy’s hiring had concerns about her prior legal work."

However, recent disclosures have triggered internal and external reviews, which are expected to continue if more information comes to light, according to the report. 

Ruemmler and Epstein's relationship appears to have really taken off in 2014, the year she left the Obama administration and was a partner at Latham & Watkins. She was put into Epstein's orbit by Reid Weingarten - a layer at Steptoe who also transferred his client, Swiss bank Edmond de Rothschild Group - to Ruemmler.  In 2015, Epstein has entered into a $25 million consulting agreement with the Swiss bank that he negotiated with Ariane de Rothschild - one of his associates. 

Ruemmler took on Rothschild as a Latham client, representing it in a U.S. regulatory matter. Latham has said Epstein wasn’t one of the firm’s clients. Weingarten went on to become one of the lawyers who represented Epstein in his 2019 criminal case. -WSJ

So it looks like Goldman is publicly standing behind their former Epstein gal-pal top lawyer, for now. 

Tyler Durden Tue, 01/20/2026 - 15:40