ZeroHedge News

Which NATO Countries Boosted Defense Spending The Most In 2025?

Tyler Durden — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 06:45:00 +0000

Which NATO Countries Boosted Defense Spending The Most In 2025?

NATO’s European members and Canada increased defense spending by 20% in 2025, the group’s biggest military buildup in the last decade.

Created in partnership with Inigo, this graphic, via Visual Capitalist's Jenna Ross, shows which NATO countries increased spending the most and how much they now spend as a share of GDP.

Spending Heavyweights, Ranked by Annual Increases

Our analysis covers NATO countries that spent over $10 billion on defense in 2025.

Belgium was the country with the biggest spending jump of 58%. Once among NATO’s lowest defense spenders, Belgium has boosted its budget to meet the alliance’s current 2% of GDP target. The country’s increased spending is focused on operations, maintenance, and research and development.

Source: NATO. Figures for 2025 are estimates.

The next largest jump among big spenders was Denmark, with a 49% increase. Threats from Russia and a bid from the U.S. administration to buy Greenland prompted the focus on defense. In the Arctic, Denmark is investing in two new ships, maritime patrol planes, drones, early-warning radar, and a new command headquarters.

Defense Spending of NATO Countries Relative to GDP

Among NATO countries, Poland spends the most on defense compared to its economic size. The country began significantly increasing its spending in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine. In 2025, its focus has been on equipment, which climbed to over half of the country’s total defense spending.

All NATO allies now meet or exceed the previous defense spending target of 2% of GDP. Most have also pledged to reach 5% by 2035, split between 3.5% on core defense and 1.5% on broader security-related investment such as infrastructure and cyber resilience. However, Spain secured an exemption from the 5% target, and pledges of that length carry their own uncertainty.

Why Increased Defense Spending Matters

Underlying the rise in spending is growing uncertainty around the stability of the rules-based international order. As alliances are strained and tensions build, geopolitical events can create interconnected losses.

Insurance risk managers and brokers can take time to understand indirect exposures and accumulation risks across energy markets, supply chains, political violence, trade credit, and business interruption portfolios.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/27/2026 - 02:45

No-Go-Zone: Rotterdam Imposes Unprecedented Nighttime Exclusion Area

Tyler Durden — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 06:00:00 +0000

No-Go-Zone: Rotterdam Imposes Unprecedented Nighttime Exclusion Area

Via Remix news,

Rotterdam has introduced an unprecedented nighttime exclusion zone across large parts of the De Esch neighborhood following nearly three years of street racing, drug use, intimidation, prostitution, and persistent noise from migrant youth gangs.

The order, which took effect on Thursday evening, makes it a criminal offense to enter the designated area between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. without a valid reason. Police can fine anyone unable to explain why they are there.

Residents, workers, visitors to local homes, and people attending events, restaurants, or bars are exempt. The measure will remain in force for three months before being evaluated.

“Calm must return to De Esch, and residents must feel comfortable and safe. That is why I am using this power,” said Rotterdam Mayor Carola Schouten.

🇳🇱 Parts of Rotterdam are now a no-go zone because of migrant gangs and anti-social behavior.

The city has introduced an unprecedented night-time ban on entering De Esch neighborhood, with those falling foul of the rules liable for a fine and a criminal record.

The council had… pic.twitter.com/uQAYWZBs9U
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) July 24, 2026

Locals told NOS that large groups of outsiders have gathered in the neighborhood after dark since shortly after the Covid pandemic. At weekends, dozens and sometimes hundreds reportedly arrive to race cars, sound horns, consume drugs, party in the streets, and leave rubbish behind.

“Once it gets dark, they go completely wild,” one resident told the broadcaster.

Previous measures, including concrete barriers, increased police patrols, and talks with those responsible, failed to bring the disruption under control.

The first night of the ban was noticeably quieter.

“I slept wonderfully,” one resident told Rijnmond. She said she had previously endured screaming, honking cars, and noise almost every night, even while wearing earplugs. “Now, the street is completely clean,” she said.

Another woman said she had stopped walking her dog alone at night because of dangerous driving and aggressive behavior. Her parents were nearly struck by cars being driven side by side on the sidewalk, while attempts to confront those responsible sometimes resulted in insults, threats, and filming for social media.

“Until now, there was little that could be done about the nuisance,” another said. “Thanks to the restraining order, it is now legally possible.”

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/27/2026 - 02:00

China's Two-Front Squeeze On America's AI Build-Out

Tyler Durden — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 03:20:00 +0000

China's Two-Front Squeeze On America's AI Build-Out

Authored by Sean Tseng via The Epoch Times,

In early May, the head of an American chipmaker told investors his company was running short of a material most people have never heard of. A week later, he was on a plane to China alongside President Donald Trump, hoping to pry loose the export licenses his factories needed.

People view an AI data center at the SK networks stand during the MWC (Mobile World Congress), the world's biggest mobile fair, in Barcelona on March 3, 2025. Manaure Quintero/AFP via Getty Images

The company was Coherent, the executive was chief executive Jim Anderson, and the material was indium phosphide, a compound that turns electricity directly into laser light.

Anderson went in part to press China over the delays it had placed on shipments of the material, according to Reuters, citing three people familiar with the matter. Without indium phosphide, the warehouse-sized computer facilities behind America's push into artificial intelligence cannot move data between chips fast enough to keep up. China, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, produces about 70 percent of the world's supply.

That bottleneck is one half of a broader squeeze on America's AI build-out. On the material front, China has restricted exports of indium phosphide and other critical minerals, raising prices and stretching timelines.

On the information front, OpenAI and several lawmakers say operatives in China have tried to turn the American public against data centers.

Experts studying both fronts told The Epoch Times that the effort has done little so far - but it reveals how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) competes when it is behind.

The Material Behind the Machines

Stephen Xia, a former People's Liberation Army (PLA) engineer who has been following the development of AI technology, said the AI contest cannot be separated from the materials that underpin it.

"AI competition is an integrated contest across algorithms, data, talent, and computing power, and it is tied to supply chains for chips, electricity, data centers, and critical minerals," he told The Epoch Times. If the CCP chokes off rare minerals, he said, it would "at the very least slow the pace at which the United States expands its high-end chips and data centers."

Indium phosphide is one of those materials. Data centers are buildings packed with servers, and as the AI systems running on them grow, the chips inside need to exchange information faster than copper wiring can carry it.

So the industry is shifting to light, sending data as laser pulses through fiber-optic cable, and indium phosphide is the standard material for the tiny lasers that feed it.

China began restricting its export in February 2025, and prices have moved sharply since: a six-inch wafer now costs about $5,000, up roughly 250 percent, industry sources told Reuters in June.

One major supplier, Lumentum, is sold out through 2028. The world's second-largest maker of the wafers, AXT, produces most of them inside China, where its export permits have been delayed.

Mark Smith, a 45-year veteran of the mining industry who formerly ran the rare-earths producer Molycorp and is now the CEO of the company behind a planned critical-minerals mine in Nebraska, NioCorp Developments, said China's grip on indium is real but not absolute.

"It's not 100 percent," he told The Epoch Times. "If we take a look at all the bits and pieces that make up the supply chain, it's probably greater than 70 percent." A few other producers exist, he said, but "it's nowhere near enough to take care of what's going to be the demand for these AI chips."

Even so, he said, indium is a milder case than some rare earth elements "where we have basically 100 percent controlled by China."

Both Smith and Xia cautioned against overstating what the CCP's restriction on these critical minerals can do.

The controls "only affect the speed and cost of data-center expansion," Xia said. "They cannot exert a decisive impact on the U.S. AI industry."

The reason, he said, is that the United States holds the higher-value ground in the competition - the advanced chips and the software - while the CCP leans more heavily on American technology, from high-end graphics chips to the software used to design semiconductors.

In an all-out fight, Xia said, the CCP "would suffer the greater losses," which is why, in his view, "even if the CCP had the means to cut off raw-material supplies, it would not dare to act unilaterally."

Smith also described the standoff from China's side. When Beijing restricts a material, importers panic - but China also needs to sell. "China needs the technology the United States has for these AI chips, and yet the United States needs the indium to make those AI chips," he said.

"We both kind of need each other - just in different ways, but for the same application." He expects that mutual need to force a degree of cooperation, at least until the United States can build its own supply, which for a mine like his takes about three years.

For now, China's leverage has held. When Washington and Beijing reached a trade truce in November 2025, China agreed to ease its controls on gallium, germanium, and antimony - but not on indium phosphide, which remained restricted into June 2026.

And where exports have resumed, Smith said, China still blocks anything tied to defense. NioCorp learned this firsthand. After it announced a Pentagon-funded partnership with Lockheed Martin in October to develop a scandium alloy for fighter aircraft, the company found it could no longer buy scandium from China, and an attempted workaround through another firm was denied. "So it's real," Smith said.

The Campaign to Turn the Public

The clearest evidence of the CCP's efforts on the second front came from OpenAI, which uncovered a China-based influence operation because the people behind it were using its chatbot to write their material.

In a June report, the company said it banned two clusters of accounts it traced to China. One, which it named the "Data Center Bandwagon," produced comments and comic strips claiming that data centers were driving up families' electricity bills; a second targeted U.S. tariffs.

OpenAI said the operators used ChatGPT through tools that hid their location, wrote their instructions in simplified Chinese, and most likely worked for a private China-based firm serving provincial government clients. It also said the direct Chinese effort reached almost no one.

That account rang familiar to Ethan Tu, the founder of Taiwan AI Labs, a Taipei-based nonprofit that uses artificial intelligence to expose coordinated influence operations and has documented Beijing's campaigns targeting Taiwan's elections.

Tu, a former principal development manager in Microsoft's AI and Research Group who worked on its Cortana assistant, told The Epoch Times that OpenAI's findings matched his own team's research.

The energy sector, he said, is a recurring target of Chinese and Russian influence work "from Taiwan to the United States to Europe," and U.S. data centers are the latest version of that.

He pointed to one detail OpenAI disclosed: the operators' written instructions told the chatbot to feature President Donald Trump but never to mention Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

"They're forbidden from mentioning their own boss," Tu said, "but Trump is fair game to attack." Because the disclosure came from the maker of the tool, which can see where accounts are based and their actions, he said it "carries a great deal of credibility."

Darren Linvill, a Clemson University professor who co-leads the school's Media Forensics Hub and has spent years studying foreign influence campaigns, said he trusted OpenAI's attribution and described the CCP as "very aggressive" in its attempts to shape opinion abroad.

Beijing pours resources into controlling how the world sees China, he told The Epoch Times, and works hardest to bury narratives that make it look bad, including by harassing Chinese diaspora communities.

On the use of AI to run fake accounts, Linvill said China was "still experimenting." For now, he said, "they aren't very good yet. But they are getting better."

Washington Sounds the Alarm

Officials in Washington have made broader claims. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told an audience at a policy discussion hosted by Breitbart News in May that state efforts to ban AI data centers are "not organic and local," and that "some of this is foreign-source dark money coming in."

Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) has asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to examine foreign influence campaigns about the build-out, and Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, said his investigators had traced Chinese money to U.S. nonprofits organizing the protests and pressed the Treasury Department to revoke their tax-exempt status.

The groups most often named sit within a network funded by Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman who lives in Shanghai and, according to a 2023 New York Times investigation, finances left-wing/Marxist-oriented 501(c)(3) organizations around the world that echo the CCP's positions.

They include the anti-war group CODEPINK, The People's Forum, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, which are all under congressional scrutiny.

The three Singham-linked groups did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.

Other groups behind opposition voices describe motives closer to home. Residents "want to feel heard in decisions that will impact their lives for decades to come," said Elizabeth Hutchings, communications manager of Alliance for a Better Utah, which has fought a major data-center project in that state and denies any foreign hand in its work. The group's core concern, she told The Epoch Times, is "a lack of transparency" from the government.

The experts who study these campaigns warn against mistaking foreign manipulation for the source of the backlash.

Taipei-based Tu put it most plainly: the manipulation is real, and so is the grievance it feeds on. The claim the bots push - that data centers compete with households for power and can raise electricity bills - is "actually true," he said, and opposition to data centers "genuinely exists," in Taiwan as much as the United States.

But there's a danger that once people become aware of manipulation campaigns targeting public opinion, they dismiss any and all grievances as manufactured, Tu warned. "When people object and you label all of it cognitive warfare, I think that oversimplifies the issue," he said.

The influence operators' real skill, he said, is blowing issues out of proportion - taking "a scattered case here and there" of genuine resentment and engineering it "into what looks like a full-blown social phenomenon."

Linvill said the data-center fight was plainly homegrown. "This debate real Americans are already very interested in having," he said, adding that China "may be trying to amplify the conversation, but I'm not sure why they need to bother."

Stoking divisive issues inside a rival's population, he noted, is "influence 101." And opposition to America's data center build-out is no fringe phenomenon: research group Data Center Watch has counted blocks or delays from local opposition to at least 75 data center projects, worth some $130 billion, in the first quarter of 2026 - mostly over concerns about electricity prices, water use, and noise.

Linvill said China's homegrown Data Center Bandwagon campaign "had no meaningful effect whatsoever" and that this was typical of China, which he said was better at suppressing unwelcome stories than amplifying them.

Xia similarly said Beijing's direct sway over American opinion was "very limited" and unlikely to "fundamentally alter the strategic direction" of the U.S. build-out.

It was the first time that China has tried to directly influence public opinion. In 2022, the cybersecurity firm Mandiant uncovered a Chinese operation that posed as worried local residents to stir opposition to American and Australian rare-earth projects, warning of radioactive contamination and calling for protests. That effort, too, gained little traction.

For Tu, the issue at hand is rarely the real target. Most of the influence operations his team tracks support no single party or position; their aim, he said, is to push democratic argument toward the extremes until "there's no room left for a neutral, objective third party," and to wear down public trust in institutions - courts, the press, elected leaders.

The end state, he said, is a creeping belief that "democracy is really just chaos, no better than China."

The Deeper Contest

For Xia, the more important competition is the one underneath the supply chains. In AI generally, he said, the CCP still trails the United States, and in military AI, the gap is wider - but the threat is pushing the U.S. military to move faster.

The real divide, he said, is moral.

American military AI is built around what is called a "human-in-the-loop," meaning a person must approve any decision by an autonomous weapon to take a life.

The CCP, Xia said, "has no moral bottom line in its AI applications" and gives no clear account of what human control, if any, oversees its autonomous weapons - one reason the United States has pushed for international rules on such systems.

The two militaries, he said, could end up developing AI in entirely different directions.

But the CCP's path, Xia said, may not be sustainable. Military AI freed of moral limits "would first bring lethal risk to its own developers," he said, "so this path is unlikely to prove workable."

A worker conducts testing in a Coherent manufacturing facility where lasers are developed for transmitting data among chips, which could decrease power use by AI systems, in Sherman, Texas, on June 16, 2026. Data centers are switching to light, transitioning from copper to fiber optics as AI systems grow. Jeffrey McWhorter/AP Photo

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 23:20

US Military Forced To Let Some Iranian Projectiles Through Its Defenses: NBC

Tyler Durden — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 02:45:00 +0000

US Military Forced To Let Some Iranian Projectiles Through Its Defenses: NBC

Some US lawmakers have begun to complain that American troops stationed in the Middle East have become sitting ducks and are in a highly dangerous situation with Iranian ballistic missiles increasingly reaching their marks. This is especially in the wake of the four US troop deaths earlier this month.

The Iranian attacks particularly on US bases in Jordan have been especially fierce of late. Also there are ongoing concerns of dwindling anti-air defense missiles in the Gulf and the region. Fresh weekend NBC news reporting has highlighted these growing problems, and has gone so far as to say that US commanders are having to ration Patriot missiles.

The Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Azraq, Jordan, which has come under attack of late. via X/The Week

"U.S. military commanders have been picking and choosing which Iranian missiles and explosive-packed drones to intercept and are allowing some attacks through their defenses, amid an effort to preserve the Pentagon’s diminishing supply of weapons that block projectiles from reaching their targets," two senior U.S. officials were cited as saying in the NBC report.

This is an astounding revelation if true, constituting an admission that American bases and host countries are much less protected than previously thought.

"Military commanders have opted not to expend munitions if they determine an Iranian projectile won't hit American forces, significantly damage critical U.S. facilities or threaten allies in the region, the officials said," NBC continues. "The strategy has been in place since the early days of the war."

While on the one hand it would make sense to not try and intercept a projectile that's clearly headed far off course into the distant desert, the host governments are likely to be alarmed at these instances of US military defenses in effect standing down.

But the report also highlights that this strategy has actually resulted in Iranian hits on US bases, in instances where those bases are said to be abandoned:

The result of the strategy, the sources said, is that some Iranian attacks make impact, particularly those that are on track to miss their intended targets, inflict minimal damage by striking an abandoned building or hit areas where there are no U.S. troops.

The U.S. officials said there also have been times when the U.S. military has allowed some Iranian missiles and drones to strike U.S. bases as long as Americans are not present. That is a departure from past practice, the sources said, where typically drones or missiles that threaten to hit bases would be shot down.

Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) previously found that during the opening weeks of Operation Epic Fury the Pentagon burned through almost 50% of its Patriot missiles, more than half of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems - designed to counter short, medium, and intermediate-range threats - and over 45% of its Precision Strike Missiles (PrSMs) during the Iran air and missile campaign.

MOMENT Houthis SHOOT DOWN ‘Turkish-made Saudi drone’

Barefoot Yemenis POSE next to BURNING WRECKAGE of $20 MILLION+ drone pic.twitter.com/lxdFczSOhB
— RT (@RT_com) July 26, 2026

US interceptors have from the start of the war been working in overdrive trying to protect sensitive Gulf facilities and bases, as dozens of inbound Iranian drones and missiles were a daily thing back in March into early April, before the tenuous ceasefire took effect. But the last couple weeks have seen a return to a high intensity air war over the region after the ceasefire broke down.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 22:45

The Hinge Of History That Was 2020

Tyler Durden — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 02:10:00 +0000

The Hinge Of History That Was 2020

Via The Brownstone Institute,

“Shocking 105 million Americans are not working – more than during Covid or the Great Recession,” blared the New York Post.

Finally that’s something.

The graph alone tells the story. You thought that having the government forcibly send millions of people into lethargy and sloth, bankrupting millions of smaller businesses, slicing and dicing workers into essential and nonessential, would be devastating for labor force participation. It’s actually worse now than in the depths of the lockdowns, and 10.8 million more than were out of the labor force in 2019, for a total of 105 million.

The growing crisis of labor drop outs since 2020 hits men more substantially than women: Woman not working up 10.9%; Men not working up 13.6%; Overall number not working up by 11.19%.

The labor force participation rate reveals the trends, not as grim as the lockdown days but still trending downwards – the opposite of what should be happening.

The topic is still taboo – but the longer time goes on, the more scholars and people will mark the Covid lockdowns as a grave turning point in the history of our times. We are now at enough distance to see this clearly in ways we could not. More than that, it was frequently denied.

Today it is undeniable. We have enough real-world data to point to the lockdowns and forced injections as a decisive desideratum of decivilization.

It’s not just the aggregate data that is sounding alarms. We have a generational shift in the works, as noted by journalistic conventions that conveniently leave out causality. “Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work,” writes Emi Nietfeld.

“Gen Z-ers are often accused of shrugging off work — in fact, they say so themselves — and who can blame them? They’ve watched millennial workers burn out, wages stagnate, degrees turn worthless and institutions crumble. Now, they’re entering what’s widely called the worst job market in years. Almost half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed. The cost of living has soared; buying a house feels impossible. Who knows where we’ll live anyway once the Earth is uninhabitable. One viral meme captured the prevailing sentiment that ‘basically nobody under 40 right now expects good things to happen ever again.’”

There are many factors at work here including tight labor markets, forced retirements, and self-reported injury. There has been a sharp rise in disabilities post-2020, reaching 38 million. So-called “long Covid” continues to get the blame despite mass forced distribution of a dangerous experimental shot.

We’ve witnessed historic declines in student reading proficiency, as 12th-grade reading scores hit their lowest level since tracking began (1992), with only 35% proficient (down from 37% in 2019). Elementary-grade reading has also dropped sharply, the largest declines in decades, worsened by prolonged school closures and remote learning.

Broader proficiency gaps appear in incoming college students, with reports of 14% of US college students testing at or below a 10-year-old’s reading level. This aligns with K-12 pandemic losses compounding into higher education, hence pervasive ignorance despite high graduation rates.

Overdose fatalities surged dramatically post-2020, with annual deaths often exceeding 100,000 in recent years — a major contributor to excess mortality. Isolation, economic stress, and disrupted treatment access during lockdowns amplified the crisis.

Researchers report nothing but confusion as to why “excess deaths in the United States kept rising even after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 1.5 million in 2022 and 2023 that would have been prevented had US death rates matched those of peer countries.”

Younger adults, minorities, essential workers, and caregivers reported disproportionately worse mental health, with elevated depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation during/after lockdowns. Social isolation directly correlated with higher distress levels in surveys.

Meanwhile, there is no end to the discovery of strange anomalies always attributed to long Covid but which are more likely due to the unmentionable injectable countermeasure. For example, one study found surprising cognitive issues such as an inability to retrieve words and their close substitution which fillers. What immediately comes to mind is the sudden ubiquity of slop language: like, you know, literally, going forward, well, to be honest, and so on to the point of unintelligibility, all massively worsened since 2020.

Total fertility is experiencing a historic decline in the US, accelerating dramatically since 2020.

So much for demographics. Let’s talk economics.

JP Morgan reports that 40-45 percent of small businesses closed temporarily while government stimulus only delayed permanent closure for millions. New firms started out of necessity – old jobs could not be recovered – but with a much higher failure rate. This has led to business consolidation as new firms are a falling percentage of total firms.

Inflation since 2020 has eroded 27% of purchasing power in official data and 37% in alternative measures.

The causal connection is rather obvious: some $8 trillion in new printed money. The result: a third or more of purchasing power was stolen from the public.

This in turn has driven down the savings rates to a low of 3%, falling after boom via stimulus payments.

The Covid period put on hyperdrive a tendency that had been in place for decades, a Fed-forced low interest rate that rewarded leverage, punished savings, and gamed a high return on rising valuations in financials. The savers were the chumps while indebted speculators made the high returns. This flipping of the entire logic of capitalist production has now been institutionalized to the point of addiction. Any stepping away from this balancing act risks default and a crack up.

The indebtedness affects not only individuals but the US government too. The year 2020 was a fundamental shift.

There are so many other inchoate changes that are hard to quantify. You see it in the social interactions of the lockdown generation, its lack of focus and attention, its awkwardness on basic functioning and decorum, its surreptitious and routine duplicity, and its outlook toward the future.

The lockdowns and all that followed were a cruel attack on civilized life. They instigated a collapse of public trust in everything: academia, medicine, public health, government, media, tech, and all the legacy leaders of society. The fallout will continue far into the future.

Isn’t it about time that the elites who constructed these policies at least own up to what they did?

Senator Rand Paul’s (R-KY) efforts to compel honesty from Anthony Fauci, and Senator Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) indefatigable efforts to chronicle shot harm (they knew the risks), are both deeply honorable.

But they are only the beginning of necessary efforts and they only cover two of the million questions that remain.

There must be truth, there must be accountability, and there must be justice.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 22:10

Trump Triggers Massive Leftist Hypocrisy On 'Transgenderism'

Tyler Durden — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 01:00:00 +0000

Trump Triggers Massive Leftist Hypocrisy On 'Transgenderism'

Authored by Andrea Widburg via AmericanThink.com,

When Trump cracked a Dylan Mulvaney joke at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he must have known what would ensue.

Dylan Mulvaney burst onto the national scene in 2022 with his "Journey to Girlhood" video series, which culminated in his becoming a full-fledged "trans woman." Democrats assured us Mulvaney was the real thing: a beautiful woman. That's why it's so funny to see them react hysterically to a joke Trump cracked at the White House Correspondents' Dinner comparing CNN's Kaitlan Collins to Dylan Mulvaney.

Mulvaney's public "trans" journey started with his video diary showing his "transition" to being a girl. Speaking as a girl, they were grotesque parodies of what girls do, but they certainly got him attention. Here are just some examples:

Dylan Mulvaney, Joe Biden, and radical left-wing lunatics want to make this absurdity normal. pic.twitter.com/44oJMBh1Cn
— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) October 25, 2022

DYLAN MULVANEY mocks and dehumanises women.

She is trying to provoke women and to sideline them by saying that she needs Tampons and wants to have a Period and menstruate. A biological male does not need tampons.

Dylan has no idea what women have to go through. pic.twitter.com/Zx7je4aaZV
— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) October 28, 2022

The Forbes Women's Summit invited this person to speak. This is what @Forbes thinks of women.

pic.twitter.com/nahiQq40MU
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 21, 2022

Dylan's self-promotion worked, and soon he was getting major ad campaigns, including the one that broke Budweiser:

Kate Spade hired Dylan Mulvaney to promote clothing for women pic.twitter.com/mM7P3d7goj
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 29, 2023

If you're detail-oriented, you probably noticed that the petite, emaciated Dylan, never the most manly of men (and you have to feel sorry for him about that, because it must have made his childhood very hard and probably explains his gender dysphoria), is looking increasingly feminine as time goes by.

That's thanks to the miracles of modern medicine. Mulvaney used his ad revenue to get:

Hairline advancement
Brow bone shave
Rhinoplasty
Minor cheek enhancement
Lip lift
Jaw shave
Chin reduction
Tracheal shave (Adam's apple reduction)
A boob job

Mulvaney does not seem to have castrated himself, although maybe he's keeping that surgery private...or maybe he's still attached to his privates.

Be that as it may, when you add good makeup and lighting to his naturally effeminate bone structure, augmented by lots of surgery, Mulvaney's face allows him to pass for a very attractive woman:

Dylan Mulvaney: "I'm so hot I could steal your husband!"

Yeah...about that... pic.twitter.com/Niws0oJNRX
— Sara Gonzales (@SaraGonzalesTX) February 13, 2023

Leftists certainly thought so, for they told us that anyone who mocked Mulvaney's obvious femininity was a revolting transphobe.

Buzzfeed reported approvingly on Mulvaney's identifying himself as a beautiful woman, and rammed the message home with multiple glamour shots of Mulvaney's heavily made-up, flat-chested, hipless womanliness.
Teen Vogue assured its malleable young readers that anyone mocking Mulvaney's feminine charms was "transphobic."
Ulta Beauty featured Mulvaney in its "The Beauty of..." official podcast, and Them derided as a transphobe anyone who dared question Mulvaney's femininity. (Ulta has hidden the video.)
Entertainment Weekly approvingly quoted Lady Gaga, who said that anyone who dared deny Mulvaney's status as a woman after viewing a glamour shot of the two of them was engaged in "transphobic 'degradation'."

You get the point: The entire Democrat establishment spoke with a single voice to say that so-called "trans women" are women and that Dylan Mulvaney was among the more beautiful of this unicornly unique species.

And then there's CNN's Kaitlan Collins, who has never denied her biological womanhood:

CaseyJNewell photograph. CC BY-SA 4.0.

She's a nice-looking woman on the outside - and a stone-cold leftist on the inside, with all that flows from that description.

The third player in this three-act comedy is President Trump, who must surely have known exactly what would follow when he cracked this little joke at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. He told the joke very badly, but it still landed in the way I am sure he intended.

Trump: "I want to personally congratulate CNN's Kaitlan Collins... I thought she had really made it big with a major new sponsorship, but then I informed her that it wasn't her on the Bud Light can, it was Dylan Mulvaney." pic.twitter.com/7UEw7WYaCW
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) July 25, 2026

What's so darn funny is that the Democrats weren't angry at Trump for claiming that Collins didn't deserve an award. Instead, what outraged them was the insult Trump offered her by comparing her to Dylan Mulvaney - the same man they once insisted was the avatar of American Womanhood:

Trump Attacks CNN's Kaitlan Collins with Transphobic Remark in Front of All Her Colleagues https://t.co/w31uosbwfW
— People (@people) July 25, 2026

Did they just say that it's an insult to liken a woman to a so-called trans woman? Were they implying that Mulvaney isn't beautiful and glamorous and that it demeaned Collins to contend that Mulvaney is her doppelganger? Alternatively, if I read The Advocate tweet correctly, it was a huge insult to Mulvaney to compare the two! Apparently, he outwomans Kaitlan in style and beauty.

And did they just get called out on their hypocrisy in a big way? Why yes, and at least on X, people were delighted to point that out:

Democrats: Dylan Mulvaney is a beautiful woman.

Trump: Kaitlan Collins looks like Dylan Mulvaney.

Democrats: How dare Trump compare Kaitlan Collins to an ugly man!
— Bad Hombre (@Badhombre) July 25, 2026

One of the important things to remember about Democrats is that they know they're lying. And one of the brilliant things about Trump is that, in true Alinsky fashion, he goads them into revealing that fact.

Image created using AI.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 21:00

Demand For "Squatter King Removal" Erupts As Maryland's Left-Wing Housing Utopia Backfires

Tyler Durden — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:25:00 +0000

Demand For "Squatter King Removal" Erupts As Maryland's Left-Wing Housing Utopia Backfires

A Baltimore-area contractor operating under the names "Squatter King Removal" and/or "Eviction King" has emerged as one of the premier, go-to property recovery services. This reflects a growing enforcement gap in Maryland, a one-party-ruled state controlled by the Democratic Party.

Years of expanding tenant protections and slow civil court procedures have weakened landlords' ability to regain possession quickly, creating an opening for organized squatter gangs who use fraudulent leases to occupy properties throughout the Baltimore metro area.

Fox Baltimore reporter Gary Collins interviewed Sanchez Deandre "Mikey" Lewis, who has built a business removing squatters.

Mikey, also known on the street as "Eviction King," charges landlords about $2,000 for his service, which includes removing doors and windows, towing vehicles, and restricting access in a full-blown pressure campaign against occupants.

SQUATTER 'STREET JUSTICE': I met up with Mikey at a Baltimore construction site his company, WolfPack, was clearing.

Since leaving prison six years ago, he told me he has added a new tiered squatter-removal service in MD and DC, earning him the title of “Squatter King.” pic.twitter.com/D65GnS52bb
— Gary M. Collins (@realgarycollins) July 22, 2026

Collins spoke with Mikey, who calls his team the "Wolf Pack" because its members swarm properties and wage an asymmetric pressure campaign designed to compel suspected squatters to leave - without assaulting or physically removing the occupants.

"Police said we can't remove somebody, so lawfully, the only thing we can do is what we could do," Mikey said.

Collins explained, "The tactics occupy a legally precarious space. Maryland generally requires property owners seeking to remove unauthorized occupants to use the courts, including wrongful-detainer proceedings. Self-help measures can carry legal risks, particularly when an occupant claims to be a legitimate tenant."

Because of Collins' previous reporting on squatting rings running amok across crime-ridden Baltimore over the last year, left-wing Gov. Wes Moore has been forced to acknowledge the chaos for landlords and introduce bills that target squatting rings.

Fox Baltimore explains just how bad squatting has gotten in the Baltimore area:

Spotlight on Maryland's investigation found that homeowners and neighbors often faced a legal maze after unauthorized occupants claimed tenancy rights, while those purportedly profiting from breaking in and selling fake leases benefited.

In one Baltimore incident, University of Maryland School of Medicine professor Ze Wang said he returned from winter break to find strangers unloading belongings into his home and showing police what he said was a fake lease.

Full Report Here:

The bigger issue here is that none of this should be happening. Yet it is unfolding in a state plagued by one-party Democratic rule that has steadily weakened protections for landlords and property owners. The squatting crisis is only one symptom.

Maryland's decline is ultimately a political failure. Baltimore risks losing its standing as a major American city and becoming little more than a diminished regional town. Unless the state's left-wing governing framework changes, Maryland faces a worsening fiscal crisis, continued population flight and further erosion of its tax base.

Total Population Collapse Under Left-Wing Regime

What is unfolding is the slow-motion economic implosion of a state as a left-wing political regime steers Maryland toward a fiscal and economic iceberg, raising the question of whether the destruction is the result of incompetence or deliberate policy.

The city's tax base has collapsed. Use this as a case study showing that the party of socialists destroys, not builds.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 20:25

Machete-Wielding Islamic Terrorist Killed By Cops After Deadly Berlin Pride Attack

Tyler Durden — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:15:00 +0000

Machete-Wielding Islamic Terrorist Killed By Cops After Deadly Berlin Pride Attack

Update (1400ET): The machete-wielding Islamic extremist who drove into a crowd at Berlin’s Pride festival has been shot dead by police.

Abdul Ballout, 21, crashed into partygoers near the Christopher Street Day Parade on Saturday night, killing one person and wounding 29 others.

As The Telegraph reports, the German citizen, who had Lebanese roots and a previous conviction for terror offences, was the subject of a manhunt for more than 20 hours until officers tracked him down to a garden shed in Berlin-Spandau.

Special forces surrounded the plot and carried out an operation on Sunday evening.

Ballout was shot dead after advancing towards officers with a bladed weapon, Berlin police said.

Iris Spranger, Berlin’s interior senator, thanked police, saying:

“I am grateful to the security authorities for finding the attacker so quickly. That is a tremendous achievement.”

More than 2,000 police officers were involved in the manhunt, which was expanded on Sunday to include long-distance trains connecting Berlin to other major cities.

Welt newspaper reported that Ballout had convictions for grievous bodily harm and violent coercion, but more recently appeared to have been radicalised as an Islamist extremist.

He was arrested in Lebanon for trying to join Islamic State in Syria and planning a terror attack.

Florian Nath, a Berlin police spokesman, said the suspect was “known to us as a member of Islamic circles here in Berlin”.

* * *

A manhunt is underway in Berlin for a 21-year-old Islamic State supporter accused of driving a vehicle into a pride celebration, killing one person and injuring at least 16 others. The German government called it a "heinous act" of violence. Given the suspect's jihadist ties, why not call it what it appears to be: terrorism?

"The chief suspect in a deadly attack near Berlin's pride parade on Saturday night is a supporter of the so-called Islamic State (IS) group and was previously convicted of related offenses, German media reported Sunday," AFP News reported on Sunday morning.

The outlet added, "The 21-year-old man named by police as Abdul B. last year traveled to the Middle East in a failed attempt to join IS, according the Bild and Spiegel newspapers. He was then convicted in Germany of "preparing a serious act of subversive violence," the papers report."

🇩🇪 The chief suspect in a deadly attack near Berlin's Pride parade on Saturday night is a supporter of the so-called Islamic State (IS) group and was previously convicted for related offences, German media reported Sunday.

The 21-year-old man named by police as Abdul B. last… pic.twitter.com/VhSvzBZWo4
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) July 26, 2026

The attack occurred late Saturday night when Abdul drove his van into a group of pedestrians at the pride festival in Tiergarten, shortly before 10 p.m.

🚨 ANOTHER DEADLY ISLAMIST ATTACK IN GERMANY.

German authorities say they are searching for a suspect identified as an Islamist following a deadly attack near a Pride event in Berlin.

Europe has been warned repeatedly about the security consequences of failing to tackle…
— Jim Ferguson (@JimFergusonUK) July 26, 2026

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, Germany's top federal security official, said they "will push with particular urgency for the resolution and punishment of this heinous act."

Yet their statement stopped short of describing the attack as terrorism...

British political activist commented on the attack:

There is currently a manhunt in Berlin for 'known' Islamist Abdul B for predominantly peacefully driving straight through a pride parade while advocating for the religion of peace.

When you allow 'known' Islamist scumbags into your country what do you think will happen?

There is currently a manhunt in Berlin for 'known' Islamist Abdul B for predominantly peacefully driving straight through a pride parade while advocating for the religion of peace.

When you allow 'known' Islamist scumbags into your country what do you think will happen? pic.twitter.com/QMwqmTpmfv
— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) July 26, 2026

The attack will certainly intensify scrutiny of Europe's backfiring mass-migration policies and Germany's failure to adequately confront Islamist radicalization. Progressive policymakers in Berlin have increasingly focused on the AfD and right-wing extremism, but the latest violence is another reminder that jihadist networks remain among the country's most serious national security threats.

Interesting given that it seems that these events in Germany are often about how bad the @AfD is supposed to be. Most Muslims in Germany (like France and the UK) favor left-wing parties. https://t.co/KSXVhCOjW3
— Alberto Miguel Fernandez (@AlbertoMiguelF5) July 26, 2026

The attack will likely bolster more support for Alternative for Germany, which has positioned itself as the common-sense opposition to the left-wing political establishment. Its growing momentum suggests German voters are increasingly frustrated with nutty lefty globalist policies that have pushed Europe closer and closer to the brink of failure.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 20:15

"Don't Flock Me": Massie Readies Bill To Yank Federal Cash From Cities And Police Departments Running Flock Cameras

Tyler Durden — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 23:15:00 +0000

"Don't Flock Me": Massie Readies Bill To Yank Federal Cash From Cities And Police Departments Running Flock Cameras

On Saturday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) announced he'll soon sponsor "a bill to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments" that deploy Flock-style cameras to surveil law-abiding citizens. He attached a Gadsden flag parody: a coiled rattlesnake wrapped around an automated license plate reader on a pole, over the words "don't flock me."

I’ll soon be sponsoring a bill to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments that deploy Flock (and other style) cameras to surveil law abiding citizens. pic.twitter.com/FGzE69psxS
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) July 25, 2026

Rather than regulating or litigating the cameras, Massie's bill would cut off federal funding to every city and police department that installs them. Flock's business model runs on local government contracts across roughly 6,000 communities, so a funding-withholding bill aims directly at its customer base.

Third Strike In A Week

Massie's bill is the third Republican move against Flock in a matter of days.

On July 21, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) filed H.R. 9800, the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, which would bar federal agencies from purchasing, funding, or accessing automated license plate readers - Flock is named explicitly - along with biometric tracking tech covering fingerprints, iris, voice, and gait. Any data a federal agency obtained would have to be deleted within 30 days and would be inadmissible in court. Burchett's pitch: "We gotta ban these dadgum things."

Earlier this month, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) tried to attach an amendment restricting the readers in committee. It failed, and Perry responded that the fight wasn't over: "STOP THE FLOCK."

In April, Massie teamed with Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) on the Surveillance Accountability Act, which would require a probable-cause warrant before federal or local agencies surveil Americans, ban warrantless facial recognition in public spaces, block the government from buying its way around the Fourth Amendment via third-party data brokers, and make individual federal employees personally suable for violations. Boebert's framing: the government is building a "digital footprint of your entire life" without a warrant or probable cause.

The Company That Swears It Isn't Tracking You

Flock Safety is the Atlanta company, founded in 2017, whose cameras photograph every passing vehicle and log not just the plate but the "vehicle fingerprint" - make, model, color, dents, roof racks, bumper stickers - into a searchable national network queried by thousands of law enforcement agencies. The install base has now crossed 100,000 cameras, a rollout ZeroHedge has chronicled as the economics of the surveillance state: one quiet law enforcement contract at a time until the country was blanketed.

Last September we noted the coming collision between the license-plate-reader gold rush and the public. Fast forward to June of this year, security researcher Benn Jordan found dozens of Flock cameras streaming publicly, documented AI features that zoom in on and follow individual people, and showed that plotting the stored data amounts to putting a month-long GPS tracker on a car. Flock's response has been that the system captures discrete points in time rather than "tracking" anyone, though those points can be plotted on a map to reconstruct movements.

Audit logs reviewed by journalists and officials showed local police running searches on behalf of federal agencies, with reasons entered as "ICE" or "immigration" - roughly 4,000 immigration-related lookups through a system whose vendor publishes a blog titled "Does Flock Share Data With ICE? No." The ACLU's assessment of that post: the company knew ICE had indirect access the whole time. A Texas police department used the network to search across state lines - including Washington state - for a woman who had an abortion. A San Francisco class action alleges out-of-state and federal agencies - ICE, CBP, FBI, ATF - queried that one city's cameras more than 1.6 million times in seven months. A Dayton audit turned up 7,000 immigration searches by outside agencies; an Illinois audit stripped access from 47 agencies; small towns discovered the ATF, the Air Force, and the GSA Inspector General rummaging through their feeds.

The system also misfires. As we noted last week, automotive journalist Joel Feder and his wife were boxed in by Minnesota officers with hands on their weapons and patted down in a parking lot after Flock's system flagged a press vehicle's manufacturer plate off a flawed partial match. Flock's response was that the cameras performed as designed.

The Exodus - And The Counterattack

Cities are canceling. Estimates run from 30 to more than 50 depending on the count: Santa Cruz, Mountain View, South Pasadena, Evanston, Oak Park. Denver removed all 110 of its cameras when its contract expired in March. Oshkosh rescinded its contract one day after approving it, after the police chief found Flock had misrepresented its heat-map tracking capabilities to the city council. This month the LAPD let its contract lapse. Meanwhile the crowdsourced DeFlock project has mapped more than 76,000 camera locations, and a parallel campaign of unsanctioned camera removals that ZeroHedge has covered extensively keeps making local news.

Flock has defended itself - insisting that its network helps solve roughly 700,000 crimes a year, and points to genuine wins - including helping track the Brown University shooting suspect in December. Flock also says new contracts outpace cancellations, with nearly 800 fresh city deals in 2026 and a network bigger than ever. In January it added a "Federal Sharing" kill switch to its admin settings, which critics call an admission that the default had been leaking all along.

Why This One Might Bite

Every federal attempt against Flock so far has failed - Perry's amendment died in committee, and neither the Burchett nor the Massie-Boebert bill has advanced. The opposing coalition is unusual: the left objects to ICE access to local cameras, the right objects to warrantless dragnet tracking of every driver, and the AP notes it is one of the few issues on which a divided country has found common ground. As the Rutherford Institute's John and Natasha Whitehead wrote earlier this month, the danger isn't the camera but the AI layer that turns a photograph of a car into the building blocks of a suspect society - an "electronic concentration camp" assembled one pole at a time.

Regarding Massie's bill - we want to know: which federal grant streams get cut, how "surveilling law-abiding citizens" is defined - any Flock deployment, or only warrantless dragnet use - and whether House leadership gives it floor time. Text is expected in the coming weeks.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 19:15

Fauci Files: A Megalomaniacal Egomaniac Milking Covid For Everything It's Worth

Tyler Durden — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:20:00 +0000

Fauci Files: A Megalomaniacal Egomaniac Milking Covid For Everything It's Worth

Authored by Tom Elliott via Substack,

On May 28, 2021, Anthony Fauci learned that the Department of Health and Human Services would refer EcoHealth Alliance - the New York nonprofit that had routed NIAID money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology - to its inspector general. That night he wrote in his diary:

"I am certain that there will be some deficiencies that the IG will find as is always the case with IG audits. Certainly, whatever they find it will be misconstrued by those who want to make a case for our involvement in the outbreak. I am starting to feel that it is important for me to write an editorial or an opinion piece giving our side of the story." (p. 753)

Our involvement in the outbreak. Followed closely by a plan to get out in front of it.

That instinct - get ahead of it, control the story, decide what the public needs to believe and then saturate every channel with it - is the organizing principle of these documents. It shows up in the origins fight. It shows up in masks, transmissibility, and boosters. It shows up in how he handled the people who disagreed with him. And it shows up, most revealingly, in what he chose to write down.

What was released

On July 24, Senator Rand Paul's committee published two documents that have not been reported in any depth.

The first is Fauci's personal diary, 1,141 pages, running from late 2019 through his retirement in December 2022. It is partly a journal and overwhelmingly a scrapbook: he pasted hundreds of articles about himself into it, frequently in full.

The second is 136 pages of internal email about his awards - nominations, ethics clearances, and the disposition of prize money.

Fauci does not date the composition of his entries, so we cannot always distinguish what was typed the same evening from what was assembled later. Page numbers refer to the released PDFs.

I. What they thought at the start

Page 13 of the diary covers two important events from January 31, 2020.

The first is that Fauci is handed the mic to serve as Covid's point person. He writes:

"White House is now fully convinced that I be the science/health spokesperson for the USG. Bob Redfield just does not come across very weel. He takes forever to say something and it is usually wondering. This drives the WH and HHS comms people crazy and so they are putting me out on all the requests."

The director of the CDC was not sidelined for being wrong, but for being slow on camera. The selection criterion was not who's the most credible scientist, but who performs best on TV.

Redfield's own account of that period, given under oath in 2023, is worth recalling. Asked why he had been excluded from the origins discussions, he pointed to ideological differences: "Because it was told to me that they wanted a single narrative, and that I obviously had a different point of view."

The second thing happens after he gets back to his office. Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust calls, sounding "very concerned," with Kristian Andersen of Scripps conferenced in and Eddie Holmes in the background from Sydney. Fauci writes down what they told him:

"The people on the phone felt that the mutations around the furine cleavage site of the spike protein could not have occurred naturally since it would require an evolutionary 'jump' that they found nowhere in bat isolates."

Deliberate insertion, they said, followed by release - accidental release being the most likely.

The next day Fauci convened a larger call of twelve experts in epidemiology. His entry characterizing it (p. 14) is the probably the single most consequential paragraph in the whole diary. There was "not total agreement about the likelihood of deliberate insertion," he writes. Ron Fouchier was certain it could have arisen naturally and said they shouldn't waste time. Christian Drosten agreed with Fouchier. And then, in Fauci's own words:

"the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible."

Ten of twelve thought it must be manmade. And he admits the person driving the zoonotic theory perspective, Ron Fouchier, was "expected of him since he was the original GOF [gain of function] person with Yoshi Kawaoka."

II. What happened next

Three days later, four of the scientists from that call were circulating a draft arguing the opposite. "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" appeared in Nature Medicine on March 17, concluding that the virus was not a laboratory construct. Andersen told the journal in his cover note that the paper had been prompted by Fauci and Francis Collins. Drafts went to both men before publication. Fauci's reply to Andersen: "Nice job on the paper."

Two months after Proximal Origin published - Fauci's institute approves an $8.9 million grant for Andersen.

On April 16, Collins wrote to Fauci asking whether NIH could help "put down this very destructive conspiracy." The following day, Fauci cited Proximal Origin from the White House briefing room podium - the most watched platform on earth at that moment.

Three weeks after that, on May 4, 2020, he told National Geographic that the evidence was "very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated," citing "a number of very qualified evolutionary biologists."

The doubt referenced in his diary never reached the public.

And his account of that February call has never stopped changing.

A June 7, 2021 diary entry (p. 767), recounting the same meeting: "About half of the people felt that this was possibly a constructed virus and the other half were convinced that this was a natural occurrence."

In a June 3, 2024 sworn opening statement to the House Select Subcommittee, Fauci said he joined a call with about a dozen international virologists, that the discussion was "lively, with arguments for both possibilities," and that after further examination several who had been concerned about lab manipulation became convinced the virus was not deliberately manipulated.

The June 2021 retelling contains another problem: he says "a few weeks later" Andersen and colleagues re-examined the data and concluded natural origin. The draft was circulating on February 4 - three days after the call. The June 2021 entry shows how he's trying to mould history into something different for posterity.

III. Habit becomes routine

Origins is where this pattern is most consequential, but it is not where it started or where it stopped. The diary shows the same strategy applied to every contested question of the pandemic: decide what the public needs to believe, then flood the zone.

Consider masks. Fauci's public reversal in the spring of 2020 is well known, and he has explained it as a response to shortages and to emerging evidence on asymptomatic spread (p. 375). But watch what happens when the question comes back around in February 2021, when he begins pushing double-masking (p. 619):

"CDC starting to do practical things that I have actually been pushing for some time. For example: Wearing 2 masks could be better than just one. They did a dummy study and showed that a cloth mask over a surgical mask actually gives a more complete fit and keeps out aerosols."

Note the order of operations: He had been pushing it "for some time," the evidence arrives afterward, and the evidence is a mannequin. That is the entire evidentiary basis for double-masking in a 1,141-page diary kept by the government's chief spokesman on the subject during the month he was urging 330 million people to adopt it.

We see every time Fauci is turned to for guidance, he makes bold proclamations without feeling burdened to verify any scientific basis. We see it in the numbers.

Across 1,141 pages by the nation's senior infectious disease official during the largest public health event in a century, here is how often certain terms appear.

Never once: "peer review." "Meta-analysis." "Risk-benefit." "Learning loss." "Mental health."

Once: "N95." "Seroprevalence." "Cost-benefit."

Twice: "Cloth mask." "School closure." "Natural immunity."

Against which:

"Award" - 80
"Hero" - 49
"Instagram" - 36
"Bobblehead" - 23
"Selfie" - 19
Entries headed "PRESS:" - 641

The question of whether prior infection conferred meaningful protection - the question underpinning the vaccine mandates that cost people their jobs - is never worked through anywhere in these pages. It appears twice, both times as an attack to be repelled.

IV. The flex

What the diary contains instead of evidentiary reasoning is an extraordinarily detailed record of influence.

March 15, 2020: Fauci records calling Bill de Blasio and convincing him to close New York City's schools, then telling him he should close the bars and restaurants, too - de Blasio "said that he would base this on my recommendation." He records a parallel call with Ann O'Leary, Gavin Newsom's chief of staff, who tells him that based on his television appearances, California will close its schools, bars, and restaurants. He records walking out of the White House to drivers honking their thanks. The next morning, federal guidelines emerge "that reflected my pushing for a more aggressive mitigation 15 day strategy."

So here we have Fauci humble bragging about shutting down the largest city and state in the country, via leverage that was entirely a function of being the man Gov. Newsom & Mayor de Blasio watched on TV.

His impact extended beyond the continental United States. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett requested a Zoom to secure Fauci's "opinion and ultimate support" for Israel's booster program, recorded it for his own Instagram, and asked for Fauci's cell number so he could "intermittently call me for advice"; with State Department approval, Fauci gave it (p. 830). The presidents of Ecuador and Chile called. So did health ministers in Brazil, Gabon, Israel, and Quebec.

The MLB commissioner wanted guidance on spring training; the NHL players' union wanted projections (p. 507). Bill Gates had a standing biweekly slot. Coach K, on a podcast, called him "the point guard for the world," and Fauci wrote it down (p. 83).

Then there is the CDC, which he seemed to be furtively running through his cellphone.

May 13, 2021: Rochelle Walensky calls to say she is changing the mask guidance for vaccinated Americans. Fauci: "She will take my advice ... I'm very pleased that she listened to me." Then the tell - "The radical right-wing maniacs who blamed me for the rigidity of the CDC recommendations will probably not realize at all that it was me that triggered this change" (p. 736).

September 2021: the CDC's independent vaccine advisory committee votes 9-6 against the booster recommendation the White House wants. Fauci, the White House's Jeff Zients, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and Leslie Dach - a Democratic operative who founded the advocacy group Protect Our Care - work the phones. Fauci texts Walensky and, in his own words, "begged her to override" the vote. She calls back at 11:25 p.m.; he misses it; they speak at 5:40 a.m. His entry: "Alas! Rochelle listened to me. She overruled the recommendation of the ACIP." He congratulates her on finally showing "clear leadership" (pp. 883-884, 887).

So, Zients had been calling him "multiple times per day asking me to continue to mentor Rochelle such that the CDC/ACIP does not veer too far off the FDA recommendations and our ultimate intent" (p. 880).

We can only guess what their "ultimate intent" is, but recall the context is loosening rules for those who've agreed to be vaccinated.

In January 2021, Zients called Fauci at dinner "asking for a favor" - a Politico reporter was preparing a story that Biden was unhappy with his COVID team, and Zients wanted Fauci to go on background and say otherwise. "I told Jeff that I would of course be happy to do this," Fauci wrote (p. 580). The next day: "I convinced them that the Biden team is a good team." In March, Zients wanted him "comfortable with" the CDC's forthcoming guidance for vaccinated people; Fauci reviewed it, decided the agency had loaded it with qualifiers, and "edited their document some what." Without a hint of irony, Fauci then adds: "Jeff was very sensitive in not having the White House interfere" (p. 642).

Here we have three nominally independent agencies, a White House coordination office, and a party-aligned outside operative, converging by telephone on predetermined outcomes, with the advisory committee that voted the other way treated as an obstacle to be routed around. This is the structure that enabled them to steamroll actual, data-driven scientists.

V. Threats to the structure

Real science requires dissent. But to Fauci, who once infamously likened himself to science itself, treated dissent as a danger to his entire enterprise.

Scott Atlas, the Stanford radiologist Trump brought onto the task force, generated an October 2020 email in which Fauci formally demanded his removal "from the Task Force and quite frankly from the White House itself" (p. 388). Days earlier, Fauci had recorded a meeting between Alex Azar and "Atlas and his 3 stooges" - Drs. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard (p. 390) - a week before those three published the Great Barrington Declaration. After a Good Morning America appearance that month, Fauci, trying to squelch these burgeoning critiques, congratulates himself: "I blew away the Great Barrington Declaration" (p. 406).

Richard Ebright, the Rutgers microbiologist who has been the most persistent scientific critic of NIAID's gain-of-function portfolio, is "truly an asshole" (p. 834); then a man pushing lab-leak because he "wants to be somebody" (p. 888); then "this complete idiot" whom Fauci resolves to handle in his memoir "since he really is a horrible person" (p. 906). In the same passage he writes that he is "terribly disappointed" in virologists Jesse Bloom and David Relman and believes they are "pushing for and even hoping that this was a lab leak."

Then April 2021 (p. 695), David Morens has told Fauci that people are trying to "bring me down." Fauci takes umbrage that these critics have received funds from the agency he was running: "It is my suspicion that some of these so-called NIAID grantees are Imperiale and Rich Ebright."

He notes that both have publicly claimed he would cut their funding for criticizing him, calls that preposterous - then closes the entry: "Let us see if in fact these are the villains."

You can only imagine him as Inspector Gadget gently stroking his cat as he typed those words.

VI. Fauci's colleagues, the press

The most revealing aspect of these pages are how Fauci worked with compliant "journalists" to shape media narratives. On July 26, 2020, while watching Brett Giroir - the assistant secretary for health and a fellow member of the White House task force - be interviewed on CNN's State of the Union, Fauci writes that Giroir was "talking bullshit about testing with Jake pressing him." Then (p. 263): "I gave Jake some questions to ask him."

So, a senior federal official is trying to undermine a rival federal official, using a CNN anchor as his conduit.

The diary records CBS's chief medical correspondent, Jon LaPook, emailing Fauci over a weekend "to prep him for his interview" before going on air, then cited Fauci repeatedly during it (p. 2). LaPook later produced the admiring 60 Minutes profile Fauci credits with driving Trump "over the edge."

Fauci even got stories killed, at least according to his telling: In January 2020, the Washington Post's Lena Sun called to check a tip that Beijing had leaned on the WHO's director-general to delay declaring an emergency; Fauci told her it was nonsense and wrote, "I probably stopped her from writing the story" - noting that Sun had come to him because he is "in all the important meetings" (p. 7).

Members of the corporate media make many embarrassing cameos in these pages: Jake Tapper sends Fauci a text making fun Laura Ingraham's intelligence (p. 113) and twice hosts Fauci for dinner at their family home (p. 420); George Stephanopoulos texts after an interview, "Thank you, Tony. So impressive" (p. 264); Andrea Mitchell calls his cell, apologetic, having assumed he had declined her show rather than been blocked from it (p. 235); Jimmy Kimmel writes his TIME 100 citation in the year he was ranked first among "Leaders," another puff piece he saves for his scrapbook (p. 357).

The pattern becomes easy enough to understand: He supplied access and the guise of expertise, they supplied a platform and a halo, and the arrangement was load-bearing enough that when a reporter got a genuinely hard tip about the WHO and China, she brought it to him before she wrote it.

VII. The scrapbook

Which brings us to what the diary mostly is: 641 entries in these pages are labeled "PRESS:" - lists of the day's media appearances, often a dozen at a time, frequently followed by the articles themselves transcribed in full. A senior scientist's pandemic journal turns out to be, by volume, a clipping service devoted to his favorite subject: himself.

The tone of what he preserved is worth registering. He kept the Washington Post column comparing a Rand Paul cross-examination of him to "watching Albert Einstein being disputed by his dry cleaner." He kept the Joan Baez portrait and her calling him an American hero (p. 292). He kept the cookies from Joe and Jill Biden with the note "You are our hero" (p. 175), and Julia Roberts gasping on an Instagram livestream that he was her personal hero, and Marian Wright Edelman calling him "a true national treasure" (p. 1113), and Beth Cameron of the NSC texting that he was her hero for what he did with Rand Paul (p. 815).

By my count he records someone calling him a hero at least 10 times across three years.

He recorded a standing ovation he could not see because he was attending by Zoom, noting in the same passage that it would be his 58th honorary doctorate and that Holy Cross was naming a science complex after him (p. 951). He recorded a Seattle Mariners crowd's ovation three separate times in one entry - claiming his opening pitch was "perfect" - alongside a complaint that the Washington Examiner had reported some fans booing (p. 1,020). He recorded being "totally mobbed by my colleagues wanting selfies. I must have done at least 100 (no exaggerating!)" (p. 1084). When the Infectious Diseases Society of America established a perpetual Anthony S. Fauci Prize, he transcribed the entire citation (p. 1086).

Anthony Fauci, writing in his diary in March 2020, clearly loving life: "Big front page article abut me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole [sic] to
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) July 25, 2026

And then there is the second document Sen. Paul's office released, which shows that a good deal of this was not happening to him. Our tax dollars were helping arrange it.

In October 2018 - 14 months before any of this - Barton Haynes of Duke nominated Fauci for the Shaw Prize. Fauci wrote back the same day (Awards, p. 2):

"Thanks, Bart. There is another one that looks possible for me if you are willing to do it. As usual, I will supply all of the material. It is the Dan David Prize."

As usual? Four days later he pitched a third and wrote the strategy himself (p. 4): the Heinz Award, category "The Human Condition," using the PEPFAR record - "We obviously will take care of all of that on my end." He coached Haynes through qualifying as a nominator, noting the "minor glitch" that the Heinz people require a CV first "because they do not want just anyone nominating anyone." He tracked prize calendars like a portfolio, telling Haynes to stand down on the Dan David until "medicine/science returns as a theme" (p. 5). He collected it two years later.

The Dan David Prize - $1 million, headquartered at Tel Aviv University - announced Fauci as its 2021 public health laureate on February 15, citing his "courageously defending science in the face of uninformed opposition." None of the coverage mentioned that the nomination pipeline had been running since 2018 with the laureate supplying the materials.

Every message in the awards file copies NIAID staff, who assembled packages, chased clearances, and eventually arranged a wire transfer. NIH's ethics counsel was described by her own superior as playing "the seminal role in assembling of the award packages" (p. 19). (Which sounds like the opposite thing an ethics counsel should be doing.) That superior was Lawrence Tabak, then NIH's principal deputy director, who personally wrote to HHS General Counsel arguing across several pages that Fauci should be allowed to keep the $40,000 attached to a National Academy of Medicine award - invoking the Academy's 1863 charter, a 1997 amendment to the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and a Congressional Research Service report (p. 30). Days earlier Tabak had written to Fauci about the delays: "my goal is to support you in the strongest possible way" (p. 18).

When the Dan David Prize cleared on April 9, 2021, the internal traffic was preserved (pp. 120-121). Arthur Bennett: "At last!!!!!!!" Patricia Conrad, forwarding to Fauci: "Congratulations....you're rich!" Greg Folkers: "I want my 15%."

We know the sum to the penny because Fauci corrected his own financial disclosure the following spring (p. 135): "The Dan David prize that was deposited in my bank account was $899,960.00, not $901,400."

Technically soliciting one's own nomination is not illegal, and in elite science it is not even unusual - most major prizes require a qualified nominator. But here we have some pretty well-scaled machinery: a federal agency's staff and the NIH's chief ethics counsel running a standing campaign, a legal argument built at the deputy-director level so a cash prize could be retained, and roughly $900,000 landing in the personal account of a sitting official who had arranged the nomination that produced it.

The final verdict

These two document dumps go a long way helping us understand how the sausage is made.

The White House needed a face that performed well under lights; governors needed cover for decisions they had half-made and took it from a man whose authority came from TV hits rather than peer-reviewed studies; a press corps needed access and a protagonist and traded a halo for both; a White House coordination office needed a scientist willing to serve as an anonymous source, edit another agency's guidance, and lean on another agency's director when her experts voted wrong. Foreign leaders needed the imprimatur of Official Science on a phone call. NIH's own leadership needed the world's most famous scientist happy, and built him the legal argument to keep his bank account flush.

And Anthony Fauci got the largest edifice of public esteem ever assembled around an American civil servant - much of which, it turns out, he had personally arranged the scaffolding for, starting 14 months before the first case of Covid.

Fauci's blast zone was wide: On a public told that guidance was science when the diary records it as message discipline and mannequin studies; on three highly credentialed academic epidemiologists who found themselves recorded as stooges; on a CDC director cut out of briefings on her own agency's guidelines; on an advisory committee whose 9-6 vote was reversed by telephone before dawn; on international agencies leaning on U.S. officials for guidance, on everyone who lost a job over a mandate ...

The story began with Fauci acknowledging his own panel of experts virtually unanimously agreed Covid was manmade, before shifting to the elaborate effort put into convincing the world otherwise. Throughout it all, we see little discussion or concern about the humanitarian impact of anything they're doing. Instead we see a craven egomaniac milking it for all it's worth.

* * *

Both documents are public at paul.senate.gov: the diary at 1,141 pages, the awards correspondence at 136. Page citations refer to the PDFs as released; word counts are raw string searches of the extracted text and include pasted press. Quotations preserve original spelling. Dr. Fauci's representatives were contacted for comment.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 18:20

Money Issues, Paranoia, And A Hurled Phone: Blistering Reports Detail Ken Martin's Collapsing DNC

Tyler Durden — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 20:55:00 +0000

Money Issues, Paranoia, And A Hurled Phone: Blistering Reports Detail Ken Martin's Collapsing DNC

The Democratic National Committee is running on fumes, and chairman Ken Martin is headed for a full-blown mental breakdown, according to a pair of blistering reports.

A New York Times report published Sunday revealed that the committee is $2 million in the hole and begging vendors to sit on their invoices until after the midterms.

The DNC quietly put the Southeast Washington building up as collateral last year to land a $15 million line of credit and bankroll off-year races, according to DC deed records not previously reported, according to NOTUS. The party has pawned the property, which it only partially owns, in past cycles. But going back to the well ahead of 2026 for the biggest off-year loan in committee history set off alarms among members who saw it as one more flashing red light.

"Ken gaslighting us about the DNC's finances and not being transparent about the financial situation makes us doubt if he can oversee the DNC during the most important primary of our lifetime," an unnamed DNC member told NOTUS.

The Republican National Committee is sitting on $128.5 million, and President Trump's main super PAC, MAGA Inc., closed out June with roughly $400 million in the bank.

The DNC has downplayed the alarm. Roger Lau, the committee's executive director, told the Times that the request for vendors to hold their invoices was "nothing more than standard negotiations with vendors over contracts and payment processes."

Meanwhile, the pressure mounting on Martin is showing, according to the Times:

In a pique of frustration in early July, he threw his phone at the desk of a junior aide while upbraiding the person. The phone-tossing incident resulted in a formal complaint to the D.N.C.'s human resources department.

The fallout from the phone-throwing episode was described by half a dozen people familiar with the incident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal party matters. None of them witnessed the encounter, and there was some dispute over how aggressively the phone was tossed. Mr. Martin was said to have thrown the phone at the desk, rather than at the aide.

Unsurprisingly, the DNC refused to comment on the incident.

To make matters worse, Martin has reportedly developed a "growing sense of paranoia" about a possible push to dump him and is "paralyzed by the idea of leaks."

"It pisses me off when I see leaks out of this building," Martin lamented during a meeting in May. "No more of that shit. No more."

"My success is your success," he added. "So the weaker I am, the weaker all of you are."

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 16:55

The AI Capex Bill Comes Due

Tyler Durden — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 20:20:00 +0000

The AI Capex Bill Comes Due

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

The S&P 500 spent most of the year riding above its 50-day moving average, and we have warned for the last couple of weeks that a break lower would be worth paying attention to. That break occurred on Thursday, as the index closed the week at 7,411.98, roughly 0.8% below the 50-DMA at 7,467, marking its first decisive break below that line in months.

Momentum has clearly rolled over. The 14-day RSI sits in the mid-40s, below the neutral 50 line but not yet oversold, suggesting there is room for further downside before the tape gets stretched. The MACD agrees with the signal line crossing bearish about a week ago, and the histogram keeps widening to the downside. This is what the early innings of a pullback look like, not the middle or the end.

One encouraging detail sits beneath the surface. The tight link between the hyperscalers and the semiconductors has broken down, and the chip complex actually held up on the week, even as the megacaps were sold. Decliners still outran advancers by roughly three to one on the New York Stock Exchange during Thursday’s rout. This was a real risk-off session, not a quiet drift. A theme that rotates internally behaves very differently from one that investors are abandoning wholesale.

The bigger trend is still intact. The 200-day moving average sits at 7,001, and the index remains almost 6% above it. A slide to the 50-DMA or even the July closing low near 7,354 would be entirely normal inside an ongoing uptrend. The line that matters is the 200-DMA. Lose that, and the conversation changes.

In our own models, we continue to hold the AI complex at target weight rather than above it. We are not adding to them, given next week’s hyperscaler prints; instead, we would rather let the reports clear and buy confirmation than pay up for a guess. That discipline has kept risk contained through every one of this year’s AI-driven air pockets.

Here is the setup for next week. First resistance is the 50-DMA at 7,467, then the early-July high near 7,566, and the record close at 7,612. On the downside, watch 7,354, then the June closing low at 7,266, and the 100-day average at 7,172. A close back above the 50-DMA would repair most of the technical damage. A close below 7,266 would put the 200-DMA in play and argue for a more defensive posture.

💰 The AI Capex Bill Comes Due

On Friday, I laid out the accounting catch hiding inside this year’s record earnings in AI Capex Depreciation Risk Is The Catch To Record Earnings. The short version is simple. The AI capex boom has flattered reported profits while quietly draining cash, and next week, four of the five biggest spenders report at once. This is where the theory meets the tape.

The five biggest hyperscalers are on track to spend north of $725 billion on capital projects in 2026, up from roughly $412 billion last year. Yet only about $211 billion of that will show up as depreciation on 2026 income statements. The rest, more than half a trillion dollars, sits on the balance sheet as a long-lived asset and gets expensed over the years ahead. That timing gap is why earnings can grow more than 20 percent while the cash going out the door explodes higher. The capex is REAL.

There is nothing improper about any of this. It is how companies book capital assets, and it always works this way. What is different this cycle is the sheer scale of the spending and the speed at which the deferred bill will land. As Todd Castagno at Morgan Stanley put it, this is “a golden window where everybody looks good.” The window does not stay open forever.

Free Cash Flow Is Draining, Not Disappearing

Here is where investors get the story half right. Depreciation is a non-cash charge. It lowers reported earnings, but it does not touch the cash a business actually generates from operations. So when you watch a hyperscaler’s free cash flow collapse, you are mostly watching capital spending outrun everything else, not a business falling apart.

Amazon is the clearest example. Its trailing free cash flow fell to $1.2 billion from $25.9 billion a year earlier. That looks alarming until you remember why. The company is pouring roughly $200 billion into data centers, chips, and power. Cash leaves today, and the asset it buys is designed to produce revenue for years.

The mistake is treating compressed free cash flow as automatic evidence of waste. Falling FCF is far more defensible when it funds reinvestment than when it funds buybacks. Betting on permanent cash-flow impairment is a bet against the best capital allocators of the past two decades.

Negative free cash flow tells you a company is spending. It does not tell you whether the spending is smart. That answer shows up later, in the revenue the assets produce.

The honest caveat is that a GPU is not a railroad. If the useful life of these assets turns out shorter than management assumes, the depreciation bill arrives faster, and the payback window compresses. That is the real debate, and it deserves to be settled company by company rather than with a single scary headline.

Four Companies, Four Different Bills

Four of the biggest AI spenders report next week, and they sit in very different places on this map. Microsoft reports on Wednesday with consensus at $4.22. It is spending heavily, roughly $190 billion in calendar 2026, and the strain already shows. Free cash flow fell to $15.8 billion last quarter on $31.9 billion of capex, down from $25.7 billion two quarters earlier. The number that justifies the bill is Azure, which management guided to 39%-40% growth. Hold that line, and the spend looks bought. Miss it, and the cash-flow math gets uncomfortable in a hurry.

Amazon reports Thursday with consensus at $1.82. Its story is the same shape, only larger. The roughly $200 billion capex plan drove trailing free cash flow down to that $1.2 billion figure. But AWS reaccelerated to 28% growth last quarter, its fastest in over three years, with a backlog north of $360 billion, and is the entire tell. If cloud growth holds, the buildout is converting. If it stalls, the market will ask much harder questions about the check Amazon wrote. It did exactly that when the stock fell 8% after the spending plan was first announced.

Meta also reports on Wednesday, with a consensus at $7.23, and it is the odd one out. Meta is pouring a comparable fortune into AI, with 2026 capex guidance just raised to $125 billion to $145 billion, yet it has no cloud division to sell that capacity to (which is why we don’t own it).

For Meta, the payback has to show up inside its own business, in sharper ad targeting and deeper engagement, with Reality Labs and the new Meta Compute effort as longer-dated options. That makes Meta the purest test of the four. Its operating margin has already slipped from the peak as spending ramps up, and free cash flow could turn negative if capex keeps climbing. Watch whether AI is visibly lifting ad revenue. If it is, the spend defends itself. If not, Meta has the least coverage in the group.

Apple is the counterexample, and that is exactly why it belongs here. It reports Thursday with a consensus at $1.89, and it is barely part of this story. Apple’s capital spending is a fraction of its cash generation, and it still throws off enormous free cash flow every quarter. Its risks live somewhere else entirely, in the iPhone upgrade cycle, Services growth, China, and the perception that it has fallen behind on AI. This is also Tim Cook’s final earnings call before John Ternus takes over, which adds a layer of narrative that the numbers will not capture. Apple is the reminder that not every megacap is running the same capex gauntlet, a point we made in Mag 7 Stocks: Risk Or Opportunity.

The Market Is Treating The AI Capex As Dead Money

Watch how the tape reacted this month, and you’d think the AI buildout had already failed. Alphabet beat on revenue, grew Google Cloud 82%, and still fell about 5% after hours because it raised capital spending again. As I posted on Thursday:

Amazon got the same treatment earlier this year. The market is pricing the bill and ignoring the asset. That is usually where opportunity hides.

Be honest about the near-term risk first. Valuations are not cheap. The broad market still trades well above its long-term average multiple, and the megacaps carry a premium on top of that. Free cash flow is under real pressure, and Alphabet just posted negative free cash flow of $5.9 billion and paused buybacks to fund the buildout. Capex guidance keeps getting revised higher, not lower, which means the deferred depreciation bill I described earlier is still growing. Add a tape below its 50-day average and the worst three-month stretch of the calendar dead ahead. More downside over the next quarter or two would not surprise me.

The AI Capex depreciation risk is great for bearish headlines, clicks, and views. However, it misses a critical point. Negative free cash for a company that is losing market share, has declining revenue growth, and is unprofitable is a clear investment risk.

However, that is not the story of the hyperscalers. The revenue that justifies all this spending is accelerating, not fading. As noted, Google Cloud grew 82%, Azure is running near 40%, and AWS reaccelerated to 28%. The committed backlogs behind them are enormous, at $514 billion for Google, north of $600 billion for Microsoft, and more than $360 billion for Amazon. Those are not the numbers of a dying business. They are the numbers of businesses that cannot build capacity fast enough to meet demand.

This is where Howard Marks and his second-level thinking earn their keep. The easy call is to sell what just went down. The harder and usually more profitable call is to buy durable franchises when the crowd has decided the story is over. The hyperscalers are not dead. They are expensive, early in the payback, and briefly out of favor, which is a very different thing. We’d use this weakness to build positions in the names where cloud growth and backlog clearly justify the spend. And we’d do it in pieces rather than all at once.

🔑 Key Catalysts Next Week

Next week is the most consequential stretch of the summer. The Federal Reserve makes its decision on Wednesday, and four of the five largest companies in the index report within about 48 hours of that decision.

Start with the Fed. The FOMC meets July 28 and 29, with the decision at 2:00 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday and Chair Warsh’s press conference at 2:30. There is no new dot plot at this meeting, so the statement language and the press conference are the whole show. The funds rate has held at 3.50 to 3.75% all year on sticky inflation. This week’s oil spike does not make the case for a cut any easier. Watch how Warsh frames the inflation risk coming from energy.

Then the earnings deluge. Microsoft and Meta report on Wednesday after the close, and Apple and Amazon follow on Thursday after the close. FactSet has S&P 500 earnings growing about 24.7% in the second quarter, marking the second straight quarter above 20%. The bar is high, and the market’s patience is thin. Companies that have missed this season were punished harder than usual, falling an average of 4.2% against a historical norm closer to 2.9Z%.

The macro calendar fills in around those events. Consumer Confidence and home-price data land on Tuesday. The advance reading of second-quarter GDP and the June PCE deflator, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, both print Thursday morning at 8:30. That lands right on top of the Apple and Amazon reports that evening. Friday brings the Employment Cost Index and the final read on consumer sentiment. There is no monthly jobs report this week, so the Fed and the megacap prints will set the tone on their own.

For portfolios, the sequencing matters more than any single release. Wednesday afternoon delivers the Fed plus Microsoft and Meta. Thursday delivers growth, inflation, and the other two megacaps. By Friday’s close, we will know whether the AI capex trade can absorb both a cautious Fed and its own cash-flow math. Position sizes should reflect that this is a week built for surprises.

What Should Investors Do Now

None of this argues for abandoning the AI trade. It argues for pricing it honestly. The businesses are real, the revenue is growing, and the best operators have earned some benefit of the doubt. But valuations already assume the capex converts cleanly, and next week, four companies have to show their work. Here is how we are approaching it.

A number that looks frightening in isolation can be rational once you see the asset it bought and the revenue it is producing. The bill for the AI buildout is coming due. Next week, we will start to find out who can pay for it.

Trade accordingly.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 16:20

Activists Target WNBA Player After She Takes Stand Against Trans Agenda

Tyler Durden — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 19:45:00 +0000

Activists Target WNBA Player After She Takes Stand Against Trans Agenda

The WNBA only has two real stars with any meaningful popular following - Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham. Both of them built reputations as underdogs in a sport traditionally dominated by minority players espousing far-left politics. Both of them have been mistreated in the past by a league that tends to play nursemaid to those same players.

The WNBA has long been a cultural joke, not just because its reputation for low standards of athleticism, but because they are constantly whining about "equal pay", "social justice" and LGBT issues. The league spends so much energy on activism that they've forgotten about the game and the fans. No one likes a bunch of crybabies making demands.

The national interest in Caitlin Clark transcends politics; people like her because she takes the game seriously and plays at a level far above most of her peers. Her mere presence on the court now often brings in double or even triple the normal WNBA viewership.

On the other hand, Sophie Cunningham has gained a reputation as an enforcer. While Caitlin Clark is being persistently battered with flagrant fouls disguised as "accidents", Cunningham has decided to dish out some fouls in return. The Martial Arts trained player has decided to "sweep the leg" on the league and she's no longer letting the abuse slide.

This month she went viral for pointing her finger in the face of a black player (DeWanna Bonner) after multiple fouls against Caitlin Clark without referee intervention. Bonner flipped out over the gesture and the WNBA was unhappy. A white girl pointing with condemnation in the face of a black player was viewed by the political left as unacceptable. The fans loved it.

This week, Cunningham was in the news again, this time because she took a public position on "trans women" (men) being allowed in women's sports. Cunningham argued that she doesn't hate trans people, but:

“I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I’m like, ‘I never once said that.’ I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

She later doubled down when confronted by the media:

“I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense. And I think I’ll always believe in that. I think it’s really important to protect children, and that’s little girls who are also involved in that category. And so I’ll stand on what I said, and I’ll always believe that.”

Rule #1 when dealing with the political left: Never apologize to the political left. It won't shut them up. They will smell blood in the water and attack even more aggressively. Cunningham seems to understand this rule well.

In response, the media has gone on the attack, admonishing Cunningham for her comments. Leftists on social media are calling for her to booted from the league. Some are burning her jersey in an effort to inspire a boycott of her merchandise.

However, as usual, whenever leftist try to boycott someone it ends up backfiring. If a bunch of mentally ill gender fluid weirdos want to buy her jerseys just to burn them, Cunningham will be happy to take their money. Beyond that, her willingness to go against the progressive agenda of the WNBA has also earned her a lot of respect.

Almost overnight, Sophie Cunningham merchandise has sold out online, including her exclusive basketball shoes in women and men's sizes. Clearly, the public has decided who they think is right on the issue of transgenders in women's sports. Multiple conservative politicians and the White House have come to her defense on the national stage.

Like it or not, everything has become political, even women's basketball. But this is largely due to media and establishment interference. Progressive journalists are constantly acting as agents of the woke movement, demanding that people with a public platform swear fealty to the cause or be ostracized. These activists got a little too comfortable with their cancel culture power over the past decade; so much so that they don't realize how quickly it's all disappearing.

More and more people are refusing to bend the knee, and sports figures like Cunningham working in the midst of these vicious piranhas should be commended for standing by their principles.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 15:45

ASU Just Made 'Influencing' A College Major

Tyler Durden — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 19:10:00 +0000

ASU Just Made 'Influencing' A College Major

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Arizona State University has decided the path to success runs straight through TikTok dances, personal branding, and "strategic storytelling."

The school's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication is now offering a full Bachelor of Arts in Content Creation, explicitly designed to turn students into influencers who can "thrive in the rapidly evolving creator economy."

The program's description states that students will learn content planning, video and podcast production, global perspectives, and personal branding. They will analyze performance metrics, experiment with content strategies, and complete a capstone where they pick a platform - TikTok, Instagram, YouTube - and spend a semester growing an actual audience with measurable results.

Arizona State University is now offering a 'Content Creation' major for students wanting to become social media influencers.

Students in the program will learn how to "market themselves."

"The Bachelor of Arts program in content creation prepares you to become an influencer and... pic.twitter.com/wnqdeA2C7H
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 24, 2026

By graduation they are supposed to walk away with a real online following and "proof they've successfully built a digital brand."

Just an inkling, but Walter Cronkite would probably never have wanted to be associated with this.

Jessica Pucci, senior associate dean at the Cronkite School, insisted the curriculum goes far beyond ring lights and dance challenges. She told local media the program delivers "professional-level guidance from faculty dedicated to helping students succeed in the rapidly evolving creator economy."

It does just look like TikTok dancing though, lets be honest.

Students, she said, will leave with something more tangible than a diploma: a following, published content, and data-driven proof of brand-building.

Critics on social media were less impressed. One commenter noted they learned the same skills in their bedroom at 14 for free on YouTube.

Another fully supported parents who refuse to bankroll this particular "education."

A third accused the university of simply cashing in on a trend without teaching anything of lasting value. Even some who saw potential in the creator economy wanted the program to include basic adult skills - mortgages, savings, taxes - before handing out the degree.

This is the latest shiny product from a higher-education industry that has spent decades converting campuses into ideological finishing schools while loading students with debt for credentials the market treats as optional at best.

Clay Travis recently cut straight to the economic root of the resulting rage.

"These highly educated young far-left Democrats hate capitalism because they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on degrees the country DOES NOT value," Travis said. "They spent $200,000 on a women's studies degree [meanwhile] plumbers and electricians are driving better cars and making MORE money. They're furious the world is valuing other people's labor more than their own. They should take a lesson... GET USEFUL SKILLS."

An influencer major fits the pattern perfectly. Four years, six figures of tuition and living costs, and the graduate emerges prepared to compete in an attention economy already saturated with teenagers who figured out the algorithm without a single student-loan payment.

The university collects the money either way. The student is left holding the resentment when the market declines to subsidize their "brand".

That resentment does not stay private. It becomes the fuel for the radical politics that now dominate so many campuses. Universities have become propaganda factories that manufacture disturbed leftists who treat practical competence as suspect and identity politics as the highest form of knowledge.

At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a required first-year education course for future teachers pushed extreme ideology on immigration, race, and gender. Leaked slides urged "humanizing language," framed border enforcement as white supremacy, and trained students to resist ICE rather than master classroom fundamentals. A whistleblower reported the class spent its time on activism while ignoring how to actually teach math or reading.

Kent State University displayed student "art" depicting President Trump's severed head on a pike with the caption "We only have to get lucky once." Administrators initially defended it as protected expression before public pressure forced its removal.

Princeton hunger strikers camping for Gaza complained the university was not monitoring their vital signs and accused officials of deliberately weakening them. One insisted, "They are not keeping track of our vitals. They are not at all taking care of us," while another claimed the group was "literally shaking" and "immunocompromised."

Joe Rogan described the broader phenomenon without restraint. Universities, he said, have become "cult camps" where students get locked into identities and try to sound profound without life experience.

"If I was going to try to destroy the country, that's how I would do it... I would radicalize the kids, give them the stupidest ideas... Boys can be girls. Girls can be boys... 'Queers for Palestine.' Death to the Jews." He added: "You guys are doing nonsense. You go to cult camp. You're indoctrinating people."

At Columbia, occupiers who had broken into campus buildings demanded food and water as "basic humanitarian aid," comparing themselves to refugees. PhD student Johannah King-Slutzky asked, "Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill even if they disagree with you?" The performance collapsed under mockery once the NYPD cleared the building.

The ideological capture reaches the sciences. A survey of 200 UK university scientists found only 58 percent would say sex is binary; 42 percent refused. Nearly two-thirds said gender is fluid.

Language itself is rewritten. The University of the Arts London erased "woman" from maternity and menopause policies, declaring the processes apply "irrespective of gender" and that "not all pregnant people are women."

The University of North Carolina issued an inclusive language guide that discouraged "mother" and "father" in favor of "guardian" and purged words containing "man."

Stanford's "Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative" proposed adding "American" to its blacklist as too U.S.-centric, recommending "U.S. citizen" instead.

Stanford University has deemed the word "American" to be harmful language.

pic.twitter.com/gclBOoE8Sn
— Ian Miles Cheong (@ianmiles) December 21, 2022

These are not isolated excesses. They are the logical output of institutions that treat useful skills as secondary to political formation.

Students graduate with expensive credentials that signal ideological reliability rather than competence, then discover the economy does not share their self-assessment.

The resulting bitterness is redirected at capitalism, borders, biological reality, and anyone still willing to call a woman a woman.

ASU's content-creation major is simply the newest exhibit. It packages the attention economy as an academic discipline, charges premium tuition for skills freely available online, and sends graduates into a labor market that will judge them by results rather than feelings.

When those results disappoint, the university will have already collected its fees and moved on to the next cohort of future radicals. The rest of the country is left paying the social cost of an education system that prioritizes 'branding' over building anything of lasting value.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 15:10

Iran Blasts "Freeloader" Zelensky For Ordering Deadly Attack On Caspian Vessel "At Israel's Behest"

Tyler Durden — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:30:00 +0000

Iran Blasts "Freeloader" Zelensky For Ordering Deadly Attack On Caspian Vessel "At Israel's Behest"

Summary:

Iran Accuses Zelensky of Ordering Deadly Caspian Vessel Attack
Weekend US Crude via IG Markets Down 5%
Iran Will Halt Tit-For-Tat Strikes If US Maintains Pause
Iran, Oman Hold Hormuz Talks As US Pauses Airstrikes For Second Day

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US x Iran Effective Ceasefire by August 31?
Yes 75% · No 26%
View full market & trade on Polymarket

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Iran Lashes Out at "Freeloader" Zelensky for Caspian Sea Attack

Iran has accused Ukraine of attacking an Iranian commercial vessel in the Caspian Sea, which it says resulted in an explosion that killed one sailor and injured another.

As we previously reported of the Saturday maritime incident, Ukraine seems to be openly boasting of this escalation. President Zelensky himself announced soon after on X, "We also have very good results from long-range strikes in the waters of the Caspian Sea. In particular, these are vessels that were involved in transporting military cargo from Iran, and a warship."

Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Ukraine’s chargé d’affaires in Tehran to severely protest the "hostile and criminal" attack on Saturday, IRNA reported. Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has further warned that the "blatant UN Charter violation" which was "done at Israel's behest" could serve to "drag Europe into its war." Araghchi also denounced and attacked Zelensky personally, calling him the "freeloader in Kyiv"...

Zelenskyy has attacked an Iranian commercial vessel, killing a sailor. A blatant UN Charter violation done at Israel's behest to drag Europe into its war.

In calls with EU High Rep Kallas and FM Lavrov, made clear that what the freeloader in Kyiv did CANNOT GO UNANSWERED.
— Seyed Abbas Araghchi (@araghchi) July 26, 2026

The risk of the Russia-Ukraine conflict merging with the US-Iran conflict seems plausible, but still remains low, and yet the Caspian Sea situation shows that it is actually possible. The Iranians have sought alternative trade and shipping routes via the Caspian, and early in Operation Epic Fury Israeli warplanes reportedly targeted and took out Iranian naval vessels there.

This isn't the first time that FM Araghchi has called out Zelensky. Back in January of this year, for example, he called Zelensky a "confused clown", and said that the Ukrainian leader had been "rinsing American and European taxpayers to fill the pockets of his corrupt generals." The two countries have previously clashed over Iran supplying Russia with Shahed suicide drones.

Iran Will Halt Tit-For-Tat Strikes If US Maintains Pause

The diplomatic track appears to have opened with the Trump administration's move to pause strikes as a goodwill gesture ahead of the weekend - now in its second day. That created space for Omani officials to meet their Iranian counterparts over the weekend, with Tehran reporting "some progress." The talks have now produced a reciprocal stand-down, under which Iran would halt retaliatory strikes on US bases as long as the US maintains its pause in airstrikes.

Reuters reports:

Iran will halt its own attacks as long as the United States maintains its latest pause on air strikes, a senior Iranian official told Reuters on Sunday, after President Donald Trump abruptly called off ‌his two-week-old bombing campaign.

After 13 nights of intensifying U.S. air strikes on Iran, the Pentagon abruptly suspended the campaign late on Friday, with no U.S. attacks reported on either Saturday or Sunday.

Iran, which had been following each night of U.S. attacks with its own strikes on neighboring countries that host U.S. bases, has also so far held fire for two days.

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, told Fox News on Sunday that Trump had decided to pause U.S. attacks to allow more time for diplomacy.

"He's giving talks some space, he's giving it a little bit of room," Waltz said, without providing further details.

The senior Iranian source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters: "Iran's position remains 'attack for attack': if the attacks stop, Iran will also halt its operations. That message has already been conveyed to the United States."

The source added: "However, Iran is prepared to mount a broad response should the U.S. launch another attack."

Asked about the pause, a senior official in Trump's administration said on Saturday that the president "has always been clear that his preference is diplomacy, but he has shown Iran what will happen if they fail to come to the table in a serious way."

The senior Iranian source said Tehran did not hold much hope that Trump's decision to pause strikes represented a major shift in the U.S. negotiating position.

"There is more skepticism than optimism about the halt in attacks. The prevailing view is that the pause is tactical rather than genuine. Iran has accumulated enough bitter experience with what it sees as U.S. deception," the source said.

As a result of both sides trying to find a diplomatic route to ending the intensifying tit-for-tat strikes that sent Brent crude futures north of $100 a barrel last week, Weekend US Crude via IG Markets is down about 5% as of late morning New York time.

Iran, Oman Hold Hormuz Talks As US Pauses Airstrikes For Second Day

The US military paused its air campaign against Iran for a second consecutive night after nearly two weeks of tit-for-tat strikes. US strikes were aimed at degrading Tehran's one-way attack drone and missile capabilities around the Strait of Hormuz, while Iran hit US bases in the region.

The pause offers the clearest signal yet that a diplomatic off-ramp may be emerging, with Iranian and Omani officials reporting progress in talks to reopen the critical waterway.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said in a Telegram post that he met with the Omani deputy foreign minister and held talks on Friday and Saturday about restoring safe transit for commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz.

Baghaei said the officials exchanged views on principles and operational mechanisms for managing safe maritime navigation through the strait.

"The talks were constructive, and some progress was made," he added, noting that technical and political consultations remain ongoing. The Omani delegation left Tehran on Saturday evening.

Camera zooms in to reveal LINE of ships all 'stopped in Strait of Hormuz' — Fars News pic.twitter.com/F8wDPdBDBT
— RTVisual (@RT_Visual_on_X) July 26, 2026

The talks coincided with the US military's two-day pause in strikes and came as Brent crude futures surged into triple-digit territory and the national average for regular gasoline jumped above the politically sensitive $4-a-gallon mark.

JPMorgan's head of Global Commodities Research and Strategy, Natasha Kaneva, told clients last week that Brent prices at this level could increase pressure on Washington to reopen diplomatic channels.

Meanwhile, Iranian Army spokesman Mohammad Akraminia appeared on state television on Sunday and warned the US that any further strikes would widen the conflict.

"I believe that if the Americans once again fall for the Zionists' deception, or move in line with them, and insist on continuing the war, particularly through air strikes, geographically this will expand further," Akraminia warned.

Akraminia said the conflict has already expanded to the Bab al-Mandab Strait on the southern Red Sea, referencing the recent Houthi attacks on tankers.

"The scope of our operations now encompasses the entire region, from US bases in Jordan to the countries along the Persian Gulf," he said.

Earlier, United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations reported an incident in the southern Red Sea after a "tanker witnessed a splash from an unknown projectile in proximity to the vessel." Details are scant at the moment.

Next week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will travel to Washington, DC to meet with President Trump at the White House on Tuesday.

Latest overnight headlines, courtesy of Bloomberg:

US-Iran Strike Pause

The US paused its nearly two-week run of nightly strikes on Iran for a second consecutive night as of Sunday morning.
According to the Telegraph, Trump paused plans to escalate the war after being warned the US is running low on missiles; the pause also allows time for negotiations with Iran.
Iran's army spokesman said Iran has also paused its retaliatory operations in response to the US halt. Still, he warned that if the US carries out ground operations, American vulnerability would increase.
Netanyahu said he will discuss the Iran situation with Trump.

Diplomacy & Negotiations

Trump said Friday the US was "locked and loaded" for major new strikes but had not yet decided whether to proceed while talks with Iran were ongoing; he said Iran would "love to make a deal" but it's not time yet.
Trump leaned toward diplomacy on Friday, referencing negotiations with Iranian officials six times during a 38-minute Oval Office appearance, while leaving open the possibility of military escalation.
Iranian and Omani deputy foreign ministers held talks in Tehran on Friday and Saturday on managing safe maritime navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, with some progress reported.
China urged Iran and the US to return to the ceasefire agreement, with Foreign Minister Wang Yi expressing deep concern over renewed escalation in the Middle East.

Regional Spillover

Iran-backed Houthis claimed to have fired missiles and drones at Saudi Aramco facilities in Jizan and Yanbu on Saturday; Saudi authorities briefly issued emergency warnings before saying the danger had passed, with no immediate confirmation from the Saudi government or Aramco.
A UK Navy report on Sunday noted a projectile fell near a tanker in the southern Red Sea; the vessel and crew were reported safe.
An LPG tanker with 28 Indian crew members was attacked in Iranian territorial waters on Friday; India's embassy confirmed the crew are safe.

Background & Context

The US had gradually expanded the scope of its strikes over two weeks, hitting bridges and infrastructure deeper inside Iran, after a brief ceasefire in June collapsed over a battle for control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Billionaire investor Ray Dalio warned that the war's outcome hinges on the Strait of Hormuz, calling a decisive clash imminent.

Previous US-Iran Wrap

Trump Pursues Diplomatic Off-Ramp As Omani Delegation Arrives In Tehran: Report

Regional Risks

War Zones Converging? Zelensky Says Ukraine Hit Ship "Transporting Military Cargo" From Iran

Energy Market

Rewiring Gulf Energy Supply Chains

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 14:30

"Now Taking Reservations For 2031 Delivery": GE Vernova Gas Turbine Backlog Climbs To 116 GW

Tyler Durden — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:00:00 +0000

"Now Taking Reservations For 2031 Delivery": GE Vernova Gas Turbine Backlog Climbs To 116 GW

By Brian Martucci of UtilityDive

GE Vernova posted double-digit revenue and order growth in the second quarter, driven once again by continued strong performance in its Power and Electrification business segments. Those segments, respectively, produce and service gas, hydro and nuclear power generation equipment; and commercial electrical equipment such as transformers and switchgears.

GE Vernova’s beleaguered third segment, Wind, saw orders fall sharply amid persistent softness in U.S. demand for onshore wind turbines and blades.

“We remain focused on what we can control,” CEO Scott Strazik said on a Wednesday morning earnings call, alluding to the economic, regulatory and legal challenges facing its wind business.

By the numbers -- GE Vernova Q2 2026

$176B: Order backlog across all three major business lines, up from $129 billion in Q2 2025
116 GW: Gas turbine order backlog, up from 100 GW in Q1 2026
$41B: Order backlog in Electrification segment, up 69% year over year
40%: Year-over-year decline in wind equipment orders

Strazik said GE Vernova expects its combined backlog of gas turbine orders and slot reservations to reach 125 GW by the end of the year. The company shipped 3 GW of turbines and signed 20 GW of orders and slot reservations, more than half of which are for the hulking HA-class turbines that customers typically run at higher capacity factors, he said.

Strazik said those customers are increasingly diverse, spanning about 100 entities in 26 countries. About 80% are “traditional” customers like utilities and 20% are data center customers, he said.

Like Siemens and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, its main competitors in heavy-duty gas turbine manufacturing, GE Vernova continues to book reservations four to five years out.

GE Vernova is taking reservations for 2031 deliveries now and is on track to “be more than halfway contracted [for 2031] by the end of the year,” Strazik said. But despite “healthy discussions” with customers about potential 2032 bookings, “I would say we need more time before we can articulate the timing of contracting in ’32,” he added.

Strazik alluded multiple times on the call to “strong” pricing for GE Vernova’s gas power equipment. Though he did not give specific figures for turbines sold in the second quarter, an analysis shared in a Wednesday note by Moses Sutton, senior analyst with BNP Paribas Equity Research, estimated about $790/kW for heavy-duty turbines, $950/kW for HA-class combined-cycle turbines and $1,800/kW for aeroderivative turbines.

Most investors would read Strazik’s 125-GW year-end backlog guidance as conservative “given management’s track record of under-guiding and over-delivering,” Sutton said. In December, Strazik said GE Vernova expected to end 2025 with an 80-GW gas turbine backlog; the actual figure was 83 GW.

For 2026, the market is likely looking for an actual year-end backlog of 130 GW to 140 GW, Sutton said.

As for GE Vernova’s plan to expand annual turbine manufacturing capacity to 30 GW by 2030, up from 20 GW today, Sutton said “the jury’s out.” Strazik’s suggestion that the company needs more time to firm up its 2032 pipeline may be a sign of “peak momentum emerging” in the company’s gas growth story, he said.

‘Early stages of a multi-decade growth opportunity’

Continuing a trend from recent GE Vernova earnings calls, Strazik sounded enthusiastic about the Electrification segment’s prospects amid what he called “this electricity investment supercycle.”

“The long-cycle electric power industry is in the early stages of a multi-decade growth opportunity and we are well positioned to create substantial value,” Strazik said.

Company figures show its overall Electrification backlog has broken above $40 billion, helped along by the completion of its acquisition of the remaining stake in GE Prolec, formerly a joint venture with Xignux, a Mexican industrial conglomerate. The merger was a factor in the company’s booking of around $800 million in U.S. transformer orders this quarter, Strazik said.

Broad-based load growth, utilities’ and data center customers’ increasing awareness of the need for grid-stabilizing equipment, and national security imperatives are all driving demand for GE Vernova’s electrical systems and components, Strazik said.

In a Wednesday investor note on GE Vernova, Julien Dumoulin-Smith, an equities analyst with investment bank Jefferies, said the company’s ongoing development of solid-state transformers and uninterruptible medium-voltage transformers set it up to benefit from anticipated data center demand for those cutting-edge electrical components.

But in a separate Wednesday note covering a range of companies in the power and electricity sector, Dumoulin-Smith cited community opposition and labor shortages as key dampeners of data center-related load growth that “place the integrity of the power supercycle into question.” Jefferies’s base case remains that data center energization accelerates in the coming years, “but not without hiccups,” he said.

Possible green shoots for wind despite ongoing industry troubles

Though the U.S. wind power industry remains under pressure from the Trump administration’s trade and energy policy, Strazik said the administration’s forthcoming guidance on Section 232 tariffs could provide more “order clarity” in the second half of 2026. At the moment, tariff-related uncertainty is impacting onshore wind development, Strazik said.

Independent energy analysts are cautiously optimistic that the sector will rebound in the years ahead. Wood Mackenzie boosted its five-year outlook for U.S. greenfield wind development by 5% this month as developers raced to capitalize on expiring federal tax credits and contracted corporate demand for clean energy surged.

“Large technology companies are turning to wind power as an additional energy source to meet their growing needs,” Wood Mackenzie said in a July 20 note.

Wood Mackenzie and Strazik both said a coming repowering cycle — owners of aging wind farms replacing older turbines with more powerful units — would support demand for wind power equipment well into the 2030s.

“In our install base in the U.S., there are approximately 10 gigawatts of units with repowering potential — projects that have already qualified for the new production tax credits,” Strazik said.

Strazik did not directly mention an ongoing legal dispute between his company and one of its wind customers, the 800-MW Vineyard Wind project off the Massachusetts coast.

GE Renewables, a GE Vernova subsidiary, threatened to walk away from the nearly-complete project after Vineyard Wind withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to offset what it called “catastrophic injury” stemming from a 2024 blade break. Vineyard Wind sued GE Vernova in April to block it from exiting its supply agreement.

In a regulatory filing this week, GE Vernova said it had “successfully completed the installation of all remaining wind turbines at the Vineyard Wind project” and has moved into the commissioning phase.

“As we work through the final stages of the project, we are working with our customer to resolve outstanding claims and counterclaims,” the filing said.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 14:00

Hawaii's Lieutenant Governor Indicted In "Biggest Bribery Scandal In State History"

Tyler Durden — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:25:00 +0000

Hawaii's Lieutenant Governor Indicted In "Biggest Bribery Scandal In State History"

Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke, a Democrat, was indicted by an Oahu grand jury on Friday on charges of criminal conspiracy to commit bribery, bribery, and falsifying candidate committee reports. The charges stem from an alleged 2022 scheme, dating to her time as a powerful state lawmaker, to steer state money toward COVID-19 testing contracts during the pandemic. Hawaii News Now reported that legal experts are calling it the biggest bribery scandal in state history.

Luke was one of five people named in the 12-count indictment. The others: Ryan Yamane, a former state representative and ex-director of the Department of Human Services; Tobi Solidum, a businessman and lobbyist; Ford Fuchigami, a Transportation Department official; and Leo Asuncion, a former chair of the state Public Utilities Commission. Luke turned herself in Friday afternoon; her bail was set at $80,000.

Gov. Josh Green did not wait for the case to develop. "The Lieutenant Governor needs to consider formally resigning to address this matter and so that the state of Hawaiʻi can move forward," Green said in a statement Friday.

The Steakhouse Meeting

According to the indictment, Solidum was working as a lobbyist and consultant to the National Kidney Foundation of Hawaii, which held a state contract to run community COVID-19 testing sites. With those contracts set to expire and dependent on the state approving emergency funding, prosecutors allege, Solidum set out to buy influence.

On Jan. 20, 2022, Luke - then chair of the powerful House Finance Committee and running for lieutenant governor - met Solidum and others in a private dining room at Morton's Steakhouse. Prosecutors allege Solidum arranged for two $5,000 checks, both made out to "Friends of Sylvia Luke," to be handed to her in an envelope she placed in her handbag. The pair discussed COVID-19 testing funding and union support for her campaign, according to the indictment - as reported by the NYT.

"By next week, we'll have 35 - so it will be halfway to our 70," Solidum told Luke, according to the filings, allegedly referring to an eventual $70,000. "Oh wow," Luke replied. "That's terrific." The day after the dinner, the indictment states, Luke ordered a House committee chair to set up a meeting with government officials to discuss emergency appropriations to the state health department.

Here the fuller record matters. The written indictment makes no direct reference to $35,000 actually changing hands, according to Honolulu Civil Beat - it alleges Solidum promised $35,000 as the first half of the $70,000. And the cash allegations in the case attach not to Luke but to two of her co-defendants: Hawaii News Now reported the indictment does not allege Luke took cash, while Yamane and Fuchigami allegedly took cash payments from Solidum.

That distinction is central to Luke's defense. She has consistently denied wrongdoing. Luke previously said she did not take "$35,000 in a paper bag," and acknowledged accepting the two $5,000 checks while denying she ever accepted a $35,000 donation - a sum that would exceed Hawaii's legal limit for campaign contributions. In a statement months ago, she said she had "never granted special favors to a contributor" and had "prized integrity and honesty above all" throughout her career.

The Informant, And The Missing Millions

The state case was built on a federal one. Ty Cullen, a former state legislator, was arrested by federal officials in 2021 on bribery charges, then began cooperating with the FBI - wearing a wire and recording meetings, including the 2022 Morton's dinner, as Honolulu Civil Beat has reported. Earlier federal sentencing records described that interaction and identified the recipient of the $35,000 figure only as an "influential" state lawmaker, without naming anyone. The same federal probe previously sent Cullen and former state senator J. Kalani English to prison.

On Jan. 16 of this year, the U.S. Department of Justice handed Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez evidence about the unnamed legislator. Four days later, Lopez announced a state investigation. Six months on, that investigation produced Friday's indictments.

Prosecutors were pointed about who they view as the center of the scheme. "If we're looking at the most culpable individual, factually, we believe it's Ryan Yamane," said David Van Acker, a deputy attorney general, per KHON2. Yamane drew the highest bail at $150,000.

And the man who allegedly orchestrated it all is gone. The indictment states Solidum "has been continuously absent from the State of Hawaiʻi," so no bail was set for him. According to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Solidum is separately under federal investigation after bankruptcy filings alleged he made off with at least $7 million from the COVID-19 testing contracts - the same contracts at the heart of the bribery case.

A Fall From Grace

The charges mark a stunning reversal for Luke, who spent more than two decades as a state representative, including 10 years running the House Finance Committee, where she oversaw the state budget and built a reputation - as Honolulu Civil Beat put it - for holding others accountable. She had been widely seen as a leading contender for governor.

Luke took an indefinite, unpaid leave of absence in April after receiving a target letter, was replaced by an acting lieutenant governor, and abandoned her re-election bid. As the state investigation unfolded, several Hawaii labor unions released statements in her support.

The political class read Friday's news through the lens of one-party control of the islands. "It goes to show that the system that's been in control of the state for so many years is following through with the perception that the public has had for so many years," said state Rep. Diamond Garcia, a Republican. A government watchdog was blunter about the puzzle at the center of the case. "If you know Sylvia's lines of power," said Camron Hurt of Common Cause Hawaii, "it's weird that she made this type of mistake."

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 13:25

Catherine Herridge Uncovers Shocking Revelations About The Biden Family

Tyler Durden — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 16:50:00 +0000

Catherine Herridge Uncovers Shocking Revelations About The Biden Family

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Investigative journalist Catherine Herridge has uncovered records pointing to Chinese blackmail efforts targeting the Biden family - documents that sat in plain sight for the legacy media, the FBI, and the CIA, only to be met with willful blindness.

In a recent appearance discussing declassified materials related to China's 2020 election influence operations, Herridge described finding references to blackmail by China that were prepared for inclusion in the president's daily brief.

"I found these records which are talking about blackmail by China," Herridge explained, adding "It was for President Biden's daily brief. I can conclude, I think, that it was probably about targeting his family."

BOMBSHELL 🚨 Investigative journalist Catherine Herridge says she found evidence that Joe Biden's family was being blackmailed by China (and shows the documents) and our mainstream media ignored the evidence "What we saw in the release of the records, which I'm afraid I think in... pic.twitter.com/FJe5dYBL6g
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) July 25, 2026

She noted that the findings, along with broader evidence of suppressed intelligence on Chinese influence, were ignored and buried in order to protect Democratic power, stating tghat "in the media or legacy media there was kind of a willful blindness. They didn't want to look at the records. All you had to do was spend a couple of hours."

Full segment:

These findings come in the wake of President Trump's primetime address to the nation last week, announcing newly declassified intelligence detailing China's massive compromise of U.S. voter data and the intelligence community's efforts to bury it.

Herridge, a veteran Emmy-winning investigative reporter, has previously pursued stories on the Hunter Biden laptop, the Biden family's foreign business dealings, and related corruption allegations - reporting that put her at odds with CBS leadership and the broader media consensus.

In February 2024 she was among those laid off in a round of cuts. CBS then seized her reporting files, including materials involving confidential sources. Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, Herridge described the seizure in stark terms: "When my records were seized I felt it was a journalistic rape."

She added that "CBS News' decision to seize my reporting records crossed a red line that I believe should never be crossed by any media organization" and that "When the network of Walter Cronkite seizes your reporting files, including confidential source information, that is an attack on investigative journalism."

She has maintained that she simply "reported out the facts of the story. I called balls and strikes." The network eventually returned the files under pressure from the House Judiciary Committee and her union.

Earlier, during the 2020 campaign, the Biden team had already labeled her a "partisan, rightwing hack." Her treatment fits a pattern of institutional pushback against journalists who refused to look away from the Biden family's financial ties.

Those ties have been documented for years. House Oversight Committee investigations, led by Chairman James Comer, obtained bank records and witness accounts showing Chinese Communist Party-linked money flowing to Biden family members.

Comer stated that the documents demonstrated the family had received funds from CCP-connected entities and that family members "attempted to sell access & influence around the world."

Biden family members attempted to sell access & influence around the world.@GOPoversight has communicated with multiple witnesses & continues to follow the Biden money trail. We will be transparent & provide the facts for the American people. @MariaBartiromo @SundayFutures pic.twitter.com/EYfQn8WEXB
— Rep. James Comer (@RepJamesComer) March 12, 2023

A subsequent memorandum detailed more than $10 million in foreign money linked to Biden family members and associates, including previously undisclosed Romanian payments and millions tied to CEFC China Energy and related entities.

Republicans highlighted wires that reached multiple family members and questioned what services, if any, were provided in return. Comer accused the White House of running interference rather than correcting the record.

IRS whistleblowers later provided additional detail on Joe Biden's proximity to Hunter Biden's China deals. One text message from Hunter to a Chinese businessman read in part that he was "sitting here with my father" and demanded fulfillment of a financial commitment, warning of consequences involving "the man sitting next to me."

Business associate Rob Walker told the FBI that Joe Biden had stopped by a CEFC-related lunch at Hunter's request to bolster the deal. Whistleblowers described DOJ restrictions that limited questions about "the big guy" or "dad," blocked certain warrants on optics grounds, and produced a far softer outcome than the felony charges the IRS had recommended for millions in unreported foreign income from China, Ukraine, and Romania.

House Ways & Means Chair Jason Smith details multiple felony charges whistleblowers say the IRS recommended against Hunter Biden, covering "$2.2 million in unreported tax on global income...from Ukraine, Romania, and China." Instead, Biden's DOJ gave Hunter a sweetheart deal. pic.twitter.com/8SdMkWgaaT
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 22, 2023

Newsmax's @JamesRosenTV reads the entire text Hunter Biden sent to a Chinese businessman which stated Joe Biden was "in the room" in an effort to get him to pay them. Kirby refuses to answer and then walks away from the podium pic.twitter.com/MsstdH4dWH
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) June 23, 2023

President Trump highlighted the same material in 2023, declaring that "Crooked Joe Biden Is Compromised, Owned By China." He quoted the Hunter text and noted the rapid transfer of millions from Chinese sources, arguing that Beijing understood the leverage it held.

Further evidence of parallel communication channels emerged when investigative journalist Peter Schweizer revealed that Hunter Biden paid for a secret AT&T global "burner" phone used by Joe Biden during his vice presidency.

When journalist John Solomon dialed the number, Joe Biden answered before hanging up. Schweizer shared the account details with the House Oversight Committee in hopes of obtaining records that could illuminate contacts with foreign executives.

Joe Biden had a private global phone with ATT that he used for Bribery deals. Impeach the SOB. pic.twitter.com/1sTeQD5sh5
— Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) June 26, 2023

John Solomon is an American treasure. Busts Joe Biden on his secret global burner phone. pic.twitter.com/CfvFnq460t
— Big Fish (@BigFish3000) June 28, 2023

Taken together, the pattern is consistent: large foreign payments, documented proximity of the then-vice president and later president to the deals, internal efforts to limit scrutiny, and a media apparatus that treated the most serious questions as radioactive.

Herridge's latest examination of the declassified China records simply adds another layer - references to blackmail pressure that reached the level of the president's daily brief - yet once again the institutional response has been to look away.

The American people were told for years that these matters were conspiracy theories or Russian disinformation. The bank records, the texts, the whistleblower testimony, the phone, and now the intelligence product references say otherwise.

Accountability still matters. The full scope of foreign leverage over the Biden family remains a question of national security.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 12:50

US One-Way Attack Drone Found Adrift In Hormuz Offers New Look At Western Capabilities

Tyler Durden — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 16:15:00 +0000

US One-Way Attack Drone Found Adrift In Hormuz Offers New Look At Western Capabilities

A suspected US-made LUCAS one-way attack drone was reportedly recovered by fishermen after it was found drifting in the Strait of Hormuz in recent days. The discovery comes as US forces have expanded their use of the Iranian-style drone during the multi-month conflict, even publicizing a recent swarm attack involving explosive-laden unmanned boats against Iranian targets.

🔴غير عادي
عثر صيادون إيرانيون على طائرة مسيّرة أمريكية من طراز لوكاس (LUCAS) في مياه الخليج، بعد العثور عليها طافية، وقد سحبوها وسلموها للسلطات وقالوا إنها في حالة سليمة.

لم يعرف بعد سبب سقوطها! pic.twitter.com/ZcxA7mZ7YJ
— الصين بالعربية (@mog_china) July 17, 2026

LUCAS stands for Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System. The first indication that the drones had been deployed came just days into Operation Epic Fury. On March 3, US Central Command announced on X that, "for the first time in history," the US military had deployed "one-way attack drones" in combat.

CENTCOM's Task Force Scorpion Strike - for the first time in history - is using one-way attack drones in combat during Operation Epic Fury. These low-cost drones, modeled after Iran's Shahed drones, are now delivering American-made retribution. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/VYdjiECKDT
— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) February 28, 2026

LUCAS Drone

The drones have been so successful for the US that the Department of War's fiscal year 2027 procurement request for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG) has surged 243-fold to $54.6 billion; a clear acknowledgment that ongoing conflicts across Eurasia have produced one important lesson: cheap kamikaze drones are reshaping the modern battlefield.

Earlier this month, CENTCOM boasted on X about a swarm of Saronic Corsair one-way attack sea drones that struck Iran's Bandar Abbas Naval Base. The attack appeared to take a page directly from Ukraine's maritime warfare playbook against Russia.

Yesterday, using multiple one-way attack surface drones, CENTCOM forces successfully struck a submarine and ship maintenance facility in Iran. Three Corsair unmanned surface vessels hit the port at Bandar Abbas Naval Base, marking the first time American forces have employed sea… pic.twitter.com/bOM2kmgRxz
— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) July 13, 2026

The world is witnessing the opening phase of robotics and autonomous warfare on the modern battlefield. One-way attack drones and unmanned vessels are precursors to what comes next: humanoid combat robots potentially entering battlefield testing in Ukraine later this year (read here).

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 12:15

US State Department Issues Travel Advisory For Belgium

Tyler Durden — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 15:40:00 +0000

US State Department Issues Travel Advisory For Belgium

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. Department of State has updated the travel advisory for Belgium, warning about risks to American travelers due to terrorism, crime, and unrest.

Police's forces blocked the area around the parliament at a protest gathering of teachers in front of the Federation Wallonia-Brussels parliament in Brussels, on June 4, 2026. Emile Windal/Belga Mag/Belga/AFP via Getty Images

Outfits inspired by terrorist organizations "are intent on attacking U.S. citizens abroad," including in Europe, the department said in a July 23 update. Belgium had been designated with the "Level 2: Exercise Increased Caution" classification earlier, with the latest update retaining the classification, while adding in risks of crime and unrest.

Terror operatives can use knives, vehicles, and firearms to target crowds. They typically aim their attacks at vulnerable and unprotected targets, such as places of worship, schools, shopping malls, public transportation systems, hotels and restaurants frequented by tourists, and high-profile public events, according to the advisory.

Low-level street crime, such as purse snatchings, robberies, and pickpocketing, is common, especially in major cities, trams, train stations, at the Brussels metro at night time, and in public areas such as restaurants, the department said. Criminals may operate as teams, targeting people by bumping or shoving into them, especially in crowds, the advisory said, while warning Americans to remain alert to distractions.

Theft from vehicles is also common, while theft of bags from trains has increased, especially along the Brussels-Amsterdam route, according to the advisory. The department asked Americans visiting Belgium to avoid wearing expensive jewelry and watches, and to carry only a minimal amount of cash and credit cards.

As for unrest-related risks, the department warned that demonstrations occur frequently in Belgium. It advised U.S. citizens to avoid areas around demonstrations and protests. Such activities can end up disrupting transportation and other essential services.

For instance, a demonstration in June against Belgium's education reforms turned violent, with clashes breaking out between protestors and police in the capital city of Brussels.

Another protest back in December, headed by farmers against an EU trade agreement, also turned violent, with Belgian police firing tear gas against the protestors.

Other European countries for which the State Department issued travel advisories include France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. All four have been given a "Level 2-Exercise increased caution" designation since May 2025, warning about various risks including terrorism and unrest.

In May 2025, the United Kingdom's travel advisory was updated, citing the risk of terrorist violence.

Meanwhile, the State Department issued a "Worldwide Caution" security alert on July 22 for U.S. citizens due to heightened tensions in the Middle East. The security environment remains complicated, with a potential for "unforeseen escalation."

America's diplomatic facilities, both within and outside the Middle East, have been targeted by rivals. Iran and groups supportive of the Iranian regime may target other U.S. interests overseas. Targets can also include locations linked to the United States and Americans anywhere in the world, including U.S. businesses and institutions, the department said.

"Americans currently in the Middle East should exercise caution and heightened vigilance and should be prepared for flight cancellations, periodic airspace closures, and potential travel disruptions," the alert said.

"Some airlines in the region have postponed resumption of earlier flight schedules; others have cancelled some routes," the alert said. U.S. citizens outside the Middle East were asked to reconsider travel through and to the region.

The alert advised Americans planning to travel in or through the Middle East to check with their air carriers and ensure that flights are still scheduled. It advised people to monitor for consular and embassy security alerts.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 11:40

France Recorded 5,000 Excess Deaths During Heat Wave: Officials

Tyler Durden — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 14:30:00 +0000

France Recorded 5,000 Excess Deaths During Heat Wave: Officials

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

France recorded more than 5,000 more deaths than normal during a heat wave that started on June 17, the country's public health agency said on July 22.

Children cool off under a misting system on the Champs Elysees during a severe heat wave in Paris, France, on July 14, 2026.Djoudi Hamani / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images

Public Health France estimated that 5,764 excess deaths from all causes occurred from June 17 to July 2. More than half took place between June 25 and June 27, and people aged 75 and older accounted for two-thirds of the estimated death toll.

Temperatures broke records on multiple days, including reaching nearly 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.8 degrees Celsius) in Saintes and 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40.1 degrees Celsius) in Paris, during the heat wave.

The excess mortality was higher in regions with higher temperatures, according to Public Health France. Nearly 2,000 were recorded in Île-de-France, which includes Paris.

The estimate was drawn from administrative data and did not include information on the cause of death.

"This excess mortality from all causes underscores the health impact linked to the remarkable intensity and duration of the population's exposure to heat across mainland France, although it did not reach the levels of 2003," Public Health France stated, referring to a heat wave that killed an estimated 14,802 people.

"These data constitute an initial estimate of the heat wave's impact on all-cause mortality, compiled and published three weeks after the end of the heat wave, and are therefore preliminary. They will need to be confirmed by more detailed analyses of the end-of-summer monitoring period report in the autumn."

EuroMOMO, a network that monitors mortality across participating European countries, recently reported that more than 10,000 excess deaths were recorded across Europe during the heat wave. Some 90 percent of the deceased were 65 years of age or older.

The organization, which is supported by the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, said that no other factors appeared present besides the extreme heat that would account for the spike in deaths.

During the last week of June, France and Belgium logged very high excess mortality, the organization said, while Spain, Switzerland, and the Netherlands noted moderate excess mortality and England, Wales, Italy, and Germany reported low excess mortality.

Sciensano, Belgium's public health institute, said recently that 1,747 more people died than expected during the heat wave, including some younger adults.

Alpinists train in the shade on the side of an exposed portion of the Mer de Glace glacier during a Europe-wide summer heat wave near Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France, on June 27, 2026. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 10:30

Meet Britain's New Cabinet Of Fakers, Fraudsters And Hangers-On

Tyler Durden — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:30:00 +0000

Meet Britain's New Cabinet Of Fakers, Fraudsters And Hangers-On

Authored by Bruce Newsome The New Nuisance,

Britons are struggling to characterize their new Cabinet, following the arrival of a new prime minister on Monday. The Cabinet is not as northern or female as Andy Burnham signaled. Most members have certainly changed. Most are not loyalists to Keir Starmer, even less so to Tony Blair. Like Burnham, many hark back to a mythical golden age of socialism in the 1970s. Like him, most are alarmingly deficient in popular mandate, external qualifications, and even political trust for their new responsibilities.

Let's start with Burnham himself, a man born in Liverpool who pretended to be Mancunian to win the mayoralty of Manchester. He claims to represent the north but has not lived north or east of Manchester. At best, he represents a narrow part of west-central England, just north of the Midlands.

Burnham has always looked south while talking up the north. Burnham was most newsworthy for agitating for changes in national government, despite sharing a party with Starmer.

As Starmer continued to trip himself up with both feet, Burnham was one of the Labourites who prevailed on ministers to brief against their PM. After Starmer blocked Burnham's candidacy for an accidental by-election in February, Burnham prevailed on a local MP to resign from Makerfield to force a by-election in June, which Burnham won easily, to return to Parliament, which would allow him to challenge Starmer for the leadership (less than two years into Starmer's five-year term). Starmer initially vowed to fight on but announced his intent to quit this month. No MP stepped up to challenge Burnham's presumptive run.

Thus, Burnham has no popular mandate to be PM, even within the party, except in the form of pledges by more Parliamentary partisans in support than against. Opposition parties rightly called for a general election to confirm his premiership, but the constitution does not oblige him.

Burnham's supporters pretend that his easy rise proves the strength of his candidacy. In reality, it proves the weakness of his party. It could not find a new leader within its own MPs, despite a whopping majority. It triggered an expensive by-election and a more expensive mayoral election to reach outside of Parliament. Meanwhile, Burnham unwittingly poured scorn on that same Parliamentary party by criticizing normal politics and the London elite. (Since then, he has aired the idea of moving the Cabinet from London to Manchester. His current plan is to spend at least one day per work week there. That's neither efficient nor effective.)

In the many weeks that Burnham enjoyed as rising PM, he remained vague about his Cabinet and his policies.

On Monday, he spent hours appointing just the highest roles in the Cabinet. The other appointments look set to continue for days.

Of the first day's picks, I must start with the only selectee who can be coded as qualified and mandated (although not loyal).

John Healey becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second most powerful position in government. He had quit as defense secretary six weeks ago, over Starmer's procrastination on filling a hole in defense spending. Healey said that Britain should spend 3 percent of GDP on defense by 2030, which means he will need to find a couple dozen billion pounds per year. Previously, he advocated issuing "war bonds," but who would buy them when the government is running record debt? He will need to cut other departments or raise taxes (probably both). On Monday, Healey said "fiscal control" would be his "first duty." You could see the markets' confidence decline immediately.

Healey's resignation suggests a certain loyalty to Burnham, but otherwise they barely know each other. More usefully, he was a minister in the Treasury under Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Yes, Healey is actually qualified by experience! This is remarkable given that his predecessor, Rachel Reeves, falsified her CV, couldn't add, and quickly became the most U-turn-prone and hated chancellor ever, as well as the most tearful.

Healey remains constrained by record government debt and his party's suicidal unwillingness to cut spending. Remember that Starmer increased spending on welfare and benefits, after backbenchers rejected his proposal to cut them. (That was within Starmer's first year of premiership.)

Burnham is an out-and-proud socialist who had already signaled that his government would spend and tax more. By Tuesday, his administration revealed plans to cut VAT (a sales tax) on electricity, to be funded by cutting the Starmer administration's planned digital ID. But the minister responsible for that plan, Darren Jones, revealed, after being fired by Burnham, that digital ID was never funded. So Burnham is either ignorant or dishonest. This . . . doesn't . . . bode . . . well.

In any case, scrapping VAT on electricity doesn't make much difference to a household electricity bill in which most of the pricing goes to fund green initiatives, debt, stealth taxes, and administration.

Burnham already looks unprepared and unreliable.

Confirmation comes in the form of his deviation from his team's prior briefings that he would appoint either Ed Miliband or Shabana Mahmood to the Treasury.

Red Ed goes to the Foreign Office, for which he is woefully unqualified and an undoubted liability. He infuriated the U.S. (and most Britons) as energy secretary, with his absolutism about reaching net-zero carbon by 2030, at whatever cost to the consumer. Ed also, by the way, reminds everybody of the weakness of the party's leadership selection. He was leader from 2010 to 2015, when he literally and metaphorically stumbled at every election husting. Yet Burnham thinks Miliband is the best person to articulate British interests abroad? This won't last long.

Miliband is already hurt. He has been denied the job he wanted, even though he was the first senior minister to call for Starmer to go, and he helped Burnham with an economic plan. (Some plan: it remains as vague as ever, except for the Soviet-style time horizon of 10 years.)

Meanwhile, Mahmood stays at the Home Office. Under-informed (or biased) souls read this as confirmation of her competence in pushing through controls on illegal immigration in the face of majority opposition from civil servants and backbenchers. In fact, she is hurdling a low bar after decades of government failures to control immigration, despite popular demands and almost every party's commitments to lower net immigration.

Worse, Mahmood is duplicitous. She tells the right wing that her tweaks to the benefits and the timeline of asylum applications will dramatically control immigration. She tells the left wing that she will make the refugee route easier (which is the route by which almost all illegal immigrants get residency, with more privileges than citizens). Also concerning is Mahmood's long history of Islamocentrism, which is bizarrely ignored by mainstream media. She tars normative Britons as racists (whites and Jews in particular: isn't that racist?), campaigned against Israel, played up her status as the first Muslim home secretary, promised that her promotion would serve "her" community, and railed against supposedly routine experiences of racism in her hometown of Birmingham, where her demographic is the largest.

I doubt Mahmood will last much longer than Miliband within Team Burnham. He favors the left of the party, which has characterized her (ridiculously) as a Nigel Farage in Labour colors. For now, Burnham needs to be seen to reward her, if only because one of her allies in Parliament, Josh Simons, was the MP who resigned from Makerfield to make way for Burnham.

So the highest three officers in the land will not last as long as normal, in my estimation. Burnham's administration will not bring the stability that Britons crave, let alone the competencies that the markets and foreign governments crave.

Talking of high ministers who won't last long, we must go next to Wes Streeting, who had resigned as health secretary (the poisoned chalice of all ministerial appointments anyway), to build support for a challenge against Starmer. Yet after the by-election, Streeting said he wouldn't run against Burnham, who now must reward him. Streeting becomes defense secretary. During the weekend's rumor mill, the former chief of the British Army, Lord Dannatt, said that Streeting "knows the square root of nothing about defence." Indeed. He's one acquisition scandal away from a sacking. And that sort of scandal leaks every few months from Britain's MOD.

From a turncoat Starmerite, we now turn to the loyal Starmerites who remain in government on borrowed time.

The highest-profile survivor is Pat McFadden, who will remain as work and pensions secretary - which is strange given that the government has decreased neither worklessness nor liabilities. Excuses abound for his early dismissal. And since Burnham is committed to the so-called triple lock on pensions and to increasing welfare (he talks about social care as the neglected component, but he's not talking about cutting anything), McFadden has no obvious options except to increase spending. That's the vicious cycle that these monkeys refuse to see, hear, or speak.

Jonathan Reynolds was Starmer's chief whip, a role that Burnham talks about deleting (he must think that everybody will love him forever without whipping). Reynolds will take over the merged departments for Science and Technology, and Business and Trade. Burnham has a short-term interest in Reynolds. Reynolds was an ineffective whip, but in his previous role, as business secretary, he temporarily solved the collapse of British Steel by forbidding more foreign ownership and investing in government ownership. Burnham has always liked public ownership of heavy industry and transportation and has already confirmed a policy to fully nationalize British Steel. But once that process is complete, Reynolds-the-Starmerite won't be needed. The backbenches are full of untested socialists who think closer to Burnham on public ownership.

For similar short-term reasons, Burnham kept Heidi Alexander as transport secretary and kept Lisa Nandy as secretary of state for digital, culture, media, and sport. The latter is one of the departments with its own unit for countering "disinformation" (i.e., criticism of government) by spreading disinformation. It's also led the lawfare to punish social media companies for "harmful" content, to restrict children under 18 years of age from accessing social media (an age that makes a mockery of the same government's plans to lower the voting age to 16), to restrict everybody's access to VPNs, and to censor information during election season. Burnham supports such authoritarianism. His hopes for the general election in 2029 depend on it.

Yvette Cooper has been demoted from foreign secretary to health secretary, which seems designed to set her up for further failure. Ironically, she is the most qualified minister by experience, having served through the Blair and Brown administrations, but that experience is to the right of Burnham's ideological bent. (Always strange to describe a Labourite as to the right of anything.) She already has a reputation for indecisiveness, invisibility, and foot-in-mouth disease. She must immediately deal with yet more strikes by medical unions unless exorbitant demands for pay raises are met. These have been going on for years. She won't last years.

Another poisoned chalice is the Ministry of Justice, given mainstream recognition of two-tier justice, increasing political violence, and overcrowded prisons (to be relieved in September by, er, releasing prisoners early, including murderers and rapists). The new justice secretary is Alex Norris, who spent a year as minister for border security. And look how border security improved.

Bridget Phillipson has been sacked as education secretary, having decimated private schools by abolishing their charitable status (one liability is VAT, at 20 percent). She keeps her job as minister for women and equalities, but I don't expect that to last long. At some point she must be sacrificed to protect the administrative state from its foot-dragging over decades of rapes of mostly white children by gangs of mostly Muslim immigrants and second-generation immigrants (with the awareness and sometimes participation of local police, social workers, and politicians, mostly from the Labour Party).

So let's get to high offices that will last, despite lack of qualifications. Get this one. The effective deputy PM goes by the titles of first secretary of state and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Burnham gave the titles to Louise Haigh. She is a strong Burnham ally, which isn't a compliment in my book, although it is some justification for deputizing. Her penchant for dyeing her hair blood-red perhaps helps. Otherwise, she isn't qualified. Her highest prior role was transport secretary, which Burnham loves (he's always banging on about subsidizing public transport and has already announced a cap on bus fares). But she held that role for just a few months in 2024, before resigning after revelations that she was convicted of fraud in 2014. Funny she hid that history on the campaign. (The irony.) So the effective deputy PM is a convicted fraudster. She's also privately educated but opposed to private education. Only in Britain … and other tinpot democracies.

We're not done with (alleged) fraudsters in government. Angela Rayner is back as housing, communities, and local government secretary, having resigned from the same role when she failed to pay a tax ("stamp duty") on her third house. It was an oversight, she said . . . even though she was the minister administering the tax.

Another promotion is Lucy Powell, the new education secretary. Does she claim any expertise in education? No. Except that she is female, which is qualification enough for most progressives of our time, and she is a close ally of Burnham, and she is from "the north" (self-declared). See the pattern?

Alas for her, the Titanic education secretaryship is heading for an iceberg that few in government are willing to admit: blowback for the government's manipulation of safeguarding doctrine to hide information (such as transgender dysphoria) from parents whom teachers think won't be supportive enough, and for a new policy of screening boys for the pre-crime of violence against women and girls, and for decades of politicized, racialized indoctrination of children, at the expense of real knowledge and skills. Is it any wonder that one in six Britons aged 16 to 24 years is not in employment, education, or training? Well, it's still a wonder to the government, conveniently.

A sort-of-incumbent is the new energy secretary. Miatta Fahnbulleh had served as Miliband's undersecretary before she quit in late 2024 when Starmer's administration cut payments to most pensioners for their winter fuel expenses. (Starmer U-turned but didn't recall her to government.) Don't expect her to permit drilling for North Sea oil and gas. Do expect her to stick slavishly to net-zero madness. The inflationary effects on the Consumer Price Index alone are enough to guarantee the defeat of this government in 2029.

In a related portfolio, Dame Angela Eagle is the new secretary of state for environment, food, and rural affairs, coming from the Home Office. Should you have heard of her? No. Her claim to fame is challenging Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership back in 2016, which gives her sort of centrist standing. Anyway, she failed. She withdrew to support Owen Smith - who also failed. It's an inspiring bench.

A surprisingly relevant portfolio to this government's failed economics is Wales. Let me explain. Burnham has asked Stephen Kinnock to replace Jo Stevens as Welsh secretary. Stephen's qualifications are: he is Welsh, and he is the son of Neil Kinnock, who led the Labour Party through general election defeats in 1987 and 1992 and yet is Burnham's ideal of the prime minister we should have had.

Stephen is the exemplar to end with - the exemplar of the terminal mess the Labour Party has got itself into:

inherited glory within a party that rails against privilege;
failed politicians lauded as greats;
doubling down on an unadmitted socialism that has already been rejected by the public multiple times, across nearly half a century;
the appointment of professional politicians to roles for which they have few non-political qualifications;
the promotion of ministers based on political ideologies and loyalties rather than functional merits; and
the retention of incumbents for short-term political purposes, to the neglect of long-term stability.

Strap in: the Burnham administration will be even more calamitous and self-defeating than the Starmer administration.

The silver lining is that it will be entertaining, so far as you can look on the funny side of outcomes that will be very bad for most Britons and catastrophic for some (such as the thousands being imprisoned for tweets, or raped or knifed to death by illegal immigrants).

Yes, Britons must suffer through three years of a premiership even worse than Starmer's before they get a chance to vote it down.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 09:30

Two Drones Shot Down Over NATO Airspace In Less Than 24 Hours

Tyler Durden — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Two Drones Shot Down Over NATO Airspace In Less Than 24 Hours

This week has witnessed more dangerous Ukraine war spillover aerial activity in Eastern Europe. In a fresh instance, Romania's defense ministry is reporting that two drones entered the country's airspace in less than 24 hours.

The military said that radar systems had earlier picked up a drone "operating in the vicinity of the Ukrainian border" Saturday morning - after which F-16 fighter jets were scrambled and successfully shot it down.

Source: Romanian Air Force

The NATO member state's defense ministry continued by describing that two of the F-16s "safely shot down in an unpopulated area near the border."

A very similar situation played out Friday over an unpopulated area near Padina, northeast of the capital, Bucharest. In that case a pari of Italian air force Eurofighter Typhoon jets were deployed and shot it down.

Authorities did not immediately identify the drone's origin but that are pointing to the Russian military. Romanian Defense Minister Radu Miruta was cited in national media as saying "the impact site and the drone wreckage are currently being analyzed" but that "the pattern is consistent with previous confirmed flights by Russian drones."

Early indicators say these were likely Shahed-type drones used by Russian forces; however, there have also been past instances of Ukrainian projectiles entering friendly neighboring countries' airspace.

These types of breaches have been happening with increasingly regularity over the past couple years. In prior incidents, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Moscow of deliberately orchestrating provocations against NATO countries.

He previously said on X during a past incident, for example, that "The Russian military knows exactly where their drones are headed and how long they can operate in the air. Their routes are always calculated."

In prior recent instances of drones entering neighboring airspace, particularly in Baltic countries and also Poland, NATO jets were scrambled - and in some cases drones are safely brought down via electronic intercept means.

But each instance creates new tensions between Russia and NATO, and the typical accusations and threats then fly. The Kremlin has of late been especially alarmed at the Trump administration transferring 5,000 US troops from Germany to Poland, near Russia's doorstep.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 09:00

France Orders Largest Peacetime Evacuation Since WWII As Wildfires Rage

Tyler Durden — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 12:35:00 +0000

France Orders Largest Peacetime Evacuation Since WWII As Wildfires Rage

Thousands of firefighters are battling fast-moving wildfires spreading across Spain and France as extreme heat and strong winds forced more than 300,000 people to evacuate or shelter in place near Madrid, Valencia and Bordeaux.

Via @PCarterClimate

Socialist Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said fires burned about 20,000 hectares over the past 24 hours, with more than 105,000 people affected and two deaths reported so far. France evacuated more than 220,000 people in the Gironde region and mobilized 1,500 troops as roughly 30 fires spread near Bordeaux.

FRANCE: France has evacuated more than 220,000 people as the country’s largest wildfire continues to spread across the southwest, threatening Bordeaux. Officials said the blaze in Gironde has become so intense that it is generating its own winds. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez…
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) July 26, 2026

Europe is burning. France + Spain: 250,000+ people evacuated this weekend alone. France: 98,000 hectares destroyed, a new national record. Worst wildfire crisis in the country’s history.

Even the Tour de France had to cut its final stage. When wildfires cancel the Tour de… pic.twitter.com/DOXFbJj8bZ
— France Safety Travel (@francesafetytra) July 26, 2026

CNN reporter Max Saltman spoke with wine expert Nicolle Croft, who said the 2026 vintage across Bordeaux is safe for now, but there are mounting concerns.

Saltman continued:

As wildfires burn west of Bordeaux, one of France's most famous wine-producing regions, concerned oenophiles have called wine expert Nicolle Croft to voice concern over the fate of 2026 vintage.

"A lot of people are contacting me from around the world hearing all these terrible stories, but actually the vineyards are not impacted at the moment," Croft, a tour guide based in Bordeaux, told CNN. "But we're all very upset because there are people losing homes."

Croft said at this time of year, the grapes aren't yet large enough to absorb wildfire smoke – a phenomenon known in winemaking as "smoke taint."

"We won't be harvesting until the beginning of September," Croft said, "so there's still time."

Dr. Phil Crews, a winemaker and chemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, explained that unripe grapes aren't as vulnerable to smoke taint. Young grapes lack sugars that would otherwise bind with bitter-tasting phenols in wildfire smoke.

Fire Map

CNN noted, "Forecasts also indicate no rain in fire-ravaged areas, as officials in France mount the largest peacetime evacuation since WWII."

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 08:35

Russia Blasts Ukrainian Drone Mass Casualty Attack On Holiday Camp In Zaporizhzhia

Tyler Durden — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 11:35:00 +0000

Russia Blasts Ukrainian Drone Mass Casualty Attack On Holiday Camp In Zaporizhzhia

Russia has blamed Ukraine for a mass casualty event at a 'holiday camp' in the partly Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia region on Saturday.

Local Russian officials overseeing Zaporizhzhia have said twelve people were killed and at least 19 more wounded due to a major Ukrainian drone attack. Ukraine did not immediately issue any statements acknowledging the deadly strikes.

Via Sputnik

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated that "Striking civilians is the method used by terrorists" in a press briefing.

ABC News later reported that "Four children were among 11 people killed in the attack on the resorts in Zaporizhzhia, Yevgeny Balitsky, the Kremlin-installed regional head, said, adding that 16 others were wounded." Russia's RT in an update stated the official number at 12 deceased.

Pro-Russian regional Governor Evgeny Balitsky was cited in Russian media as saying:

“The enemy knew exactly who they were targeting and deliberately struck civilians,” Balitsky said in a statement on Max. “This is a blatant crime and a hallmark of the Ukrainian regime. Unable to confront us on equal terms, they instead target civilians – women and children.”

He said that among the wounded being treated by emergency medical teams are five children.

Zaporozhye Region came under formal Russian control in September 2022, after a 'popular referendum' - following the Russian military ground onslaught across eastern and parts of southern Ukraine.

Overnight, Russian drones unleashed death in Ukrainian towns as well:

Sumy regional head Oleh Hryhorov said on Saturday three people were killed when a large fire broke out after a Russian drone struck a “civilian facility,” adding that the victims were drivers for private Ukrainian postal and courier service Nova Poshta.

Russia’s defense ministry said it attacked a “storage and launch site” for Ukrainian drones in the Sumy region.

Footage of the aftermath shows extensive damage and destruction at the camp:

❗️Consecuencias del ataque ucraniano a campamentos turísticos rusos

12 personas murieron y 19 resultaron heridas en un ataque de las Fuerzas Armadas ucranianas contra campamentos turísticos en la provincia rusa de Zaporozhie. pic.twitter.com/yJQVsaqBQY
— RT en Español (@ActualidadRT) July 25, 2026

Russian regions bordering Ukraine have also been coming under heavy attack from Ukraine, including Belgorod, Bryansk and Kursk. These oblasts have frequently been targeted throughout the years-long war.

Currently, Ukraine has been especially targeting not only energy sites deep inside Russia, but logistics hubs and warehouses of the large company Wildberries, which is often called the 'Amazon of Russia'.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/26/2026 - 07:35