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Mon, 27 Jul 2026 03:20:00 +0000 China's Two-Front Squeeze On America's AI Build-Out
China's Two-Front Squeeze On America's AI Build-Out
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 Close
Mon, 27 Jul 2026 02:45:00 +0000 US Military Forced To Let Some Iranian Projectiles Through Its Defenses: NBC
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 situatio
Read more.....
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.
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 Close
Mon, 27 Jul 2026 02:10:00 +0000 The Hinge Of History That Was 2020
The Hinge Of History That Was 2020
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 Close
Mon, 27 Jul 2026 01:00:00 +0000 Trump Triggers Massive Leftist Hypocrisy On 'Transgenderism'
Trump Triggers Massive Leftist Hypocrisy On 'Transgenderism'
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's self-promotion worked, and soon he was getting major ad campaigns, including the one that broke Budweiser:
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
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 Close
Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:25:00 +0000 Demand For "Squatter King Removal" Erupts As Maryland's Left-Wing Housing Utopia Backfires
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 em
Read more.....
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.
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:
VIDEO
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 Close
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
"Don't Flock Me": Massie Readies Bill To Yank Federal Cash From Cities And Police Departments Running Flock Cameras
"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."
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.
VIDEO
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 Close
Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:20:00 +0000 Fauci Files: A Megalomaniacal Egomaniac Milking Covid For Everything It's Worth
Fauci Files: A Megalomaniacal Egomaniac Milking Covid For Everything It's Worth
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).
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 Close
Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:15:00 +0000 Machete-Wielding Islamic Terrorist Killed By Cops After Deadly Berlin Pride Attack
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
Read more.....
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 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.
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?
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.
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 - 18:15 Close
Sun, 26 Jul 2026 20:55:00 +0000 Money Issues, Paranoia, And A Hurled Phone: Blistering Reports Detail Ken Martin's Collapsing DNC
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 me
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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 Close
Sun, 26 Jul 2026 20:20:00 +0000 The AI Capex Bill Comes Due
The AI Capex Bill Comes Due
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 Close