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Authored by James Bovard via Brownstone Institute,

In the same way that medieval kings seized any excuse to invade neighboring countries, today's politicians perennially seek pretexts to further invade citizens' lives. And there is never a shortage of intellectuals who, like the courtiers long ago, assure their masters that God - or at least social science - blesses their aggression.

Inside the Washington beltway, it is bad taste to recognize how federal policy is often shaped by the love of power. Experts and activists persistently overestimate the likelihood of successful interventions because of their starry-eyed assumptions about the political class. Because political scientists cannot measure power lust, they leave it out of their equations. This makes everything neat and tidy garbage.

The more power that government amasses, the more intellectual homage it receives. Washington experts constitute a Greek chorus that bestows accolades on the Powers That Be. There are now more than 400 think tanks in the Washington area, some of which offer little more than an intellectual version of "rent-a-mobs" of political protestors.

Oppressive regimes buy good reputations as think tanks become "a muscular arm of foreign governments' lobbying in Washington," the New York Times reported in 2014. The Brookings Institution received a windfall from the government of Qatar, which has a dismal human-rights record, to set up a research institute that, according to the Qatari government, would devote itself to "reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones."

After an especially tawdry fixed election in 2011, the Kazakhstan government's image was burnished by two think tanks on its payroll - the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Institute for New Democracies. The Atlantic Council, another prominent D.C. think tank, pockets cash from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and NATO. The Times noted in 2014 that "since 2011, at least 64 foreign governments, state-controlled entities or government officials have contributed to a group of 28 major United States-based research organizations."

Washington think tanks proliferated at the same time that federal policies became more hare-brained. Some think tanks are little more than "cash machines for power" for politicians. Clifford May, the president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, commented in 2005: "It is the job of think tanks to create political capital. It is the job of politicians to spend it." May's think tank extols politicians who advocate bombing Muslim nations.

The profusion of think tanks and policy wonks spawn the illusion that ideas drive policy in Washington. But in many cases, ideas are simply pretenses to sanctify the pursuit of power. A president or prominent politician knows he can recite bosh and a bevy of commentators will race to praise his courage and vision. For instance, in a 2016 email to Hillary Clinton presidential campaign chief John Podesta, Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, assured him that she was a "loyal soldier" and that "I would do whatever Hillary [Clinton] needs always." The Washington definition of "independent thinker" is merely someone without a visible receipt for his opinions.

Some think tanks have been fronts for political operatives. Jack Abramoff, the most powerful lobbyist in Washington during the early years of the George W. Bush administration, placed an aging beach lifeguard at the head of American International Center, a think tank he created to funnel money to himself and his favorite causes. The scam was fruitful until Abramoff's other machinations won him admission to federal prison.

Newt Gingrich's boutique think tank, the Center for Health Transformation, pocketed $37 million from healthcare corporations and industry groups before going bankrupt in 2012 after Gingrich's presidential campaign floundered. Gingrich used his op-eds and speeches to tout positions favored by his think-tank donors and omitted mentioning who was bankrolling his operation.

Think tanks have done nothing to countervail Washington tendencies that conspire against common sense. As the New York Times' Mark Leibovich noted, "From the moment Obama secured the Democratic nomination [in 2008], he and his staff were subjected to a frantic frenzy of flattery." The more applause a politician hears, the more deluded he usually becomes. And the biggest hallucination in Washington is that politicians' power is a great blessing for America. That assumption would be scoffed at in most places but is greeted with solemn nods in receptions and briefings in the nation's capital.

The more power politicians capture, the more profitable lying about government becomes. Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek, in his famous 1944 essay in The Road to Serfdom, "Why the Worst Get on Top," showed why, once government acquires vast power, "the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion." In the same way, Washington is biased in favor of intellectuals who defend torture, illegal government surveillance, and presidential killing sprees.

Former White House spokesman Bill Moyers observed in 2007: "The further you get away from official Washington, the closer you get to reality." Rewards go to those who report what politicians want to hear, and political loyalty is infinitely more prized in D.C. than fidelity to facts. As attorney-author Chase Madar observed, "When there is good intel that runs against the political winds, the intel gets politicized. The politics don't get intelligent."

For instance, President Obama ignored dire warnings before committing far more soldiers to the Afghan war. Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran noted, "Obama purposely did not read a grim CIA assessment of Afghanistan that found little measurable benefit from the 30,000 'surge' forces Obama eventually approved."

Bad policies balloon into national catastrophes because politicians ignore bitter realities. In 1967, the Pentagon ordered top experts to analyze where the war in Vietnam had gone wrong. The resulting study contained 47 volumes of material exposing the intellectual and political follies that had already left tens of thousands of Americans dead. After the study was finished, it was distributed to the key players and federal agencies - and completely ignored. At the time the New York Times began publishing excerpts in 1971, "the White House and the State Department were unable even to locate the forty-seven volumes." New York Times editor Tom Wicker commented at the time that "the people who read these documents in the Times were the first to study them."

Daniel Ellsberg, who helped write the Pentagon Papers and leaked the documents to the press, was stunned by the incorrigibility of US policy. No matter how many Ivy League grads and Whiz Kids were manning the helm, "there was a general failure to study history or to analyze or even to record operational experience, especially mistakes. Above all, effective pressures for optimistically false reporting at every level, for describing 'progress' rather than problems or failure, concealed the very need for change in approach or for learning," Ellsberg observed.

Paternalist policies are also skewed because federal agencies usually ignore any costs they are not compelled to pay. The Supreme Court declared in 1803 that "the very essence of civil liberty certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws, whenever he receives an injury." But agencies routinely define such injuries to private citizens out of existence. The history of federal interventions is littered with collateral victims who the government claimed never existed. Instead, agencies boast of money spent and legions of purported beneficiaries and ignore everything else.

Paternalism presumes that government will serve the people even better than the people could have served themselves. Why? Because government knows best. But this simply means nothing more than "government employees know best." And why do they know best? Because they work for the government.

"Honest paternalism" is almost as rare as an honest war. Once the political-bureaucratic class labels vast swaths of people unfit to run their lives, it is almost inevitable that federal policies will be shrouded in deceit and denial. The presumption that some people must forcibly care for other people drives a wooden stake into any hope for honest government. The details of "paternalistic" interventions will be determined by political calculations that have nothing to do with benefiting the American public. Instead, there will be a series of closed door deals - or in the case of the creation of the Obamacare legislation, a secret black box computer program.

Paternalism is fashionable in part because it is self-evident that Washingtonians are superior to the rest of the nation. In reality, federal officials are almost as ignorant of the American people as citizens are of government operations.

Johns Hopkins University political scientists Jennifer Bachner and Benjamin Ginsburg surveyed almost 900 federal bureaucrats, White House and Congressional staffers, and other members of the Washington policy community for their 2016 book What Washington Gets Wrong: The Unelected Officials Who Actually Run the Government and Their Misconceptions about the American People.

Bachner and Ginsburg noted a "pervasive attitude of smug dismissiveness toward the citizenry and little sense of accountability" as well as a "sense of cultural or intellectual superiority" inside the "Beltway Bubble." Washington policymakers favor punitive solutions in part because they fail to understand fellow citizens: "Government officials writing rules inconsistent with the life experiences and understandings of ordinary Americans find compliance a problem and resort to harsh measures....Hence, 'enforcement' is a hot topic in official Washington."

Washington Post reporter Jeff Guo, reviewing the book, insisted that "a lot of this elitism is probably justifiable" because most of the survey respondents had advanced degrees. Guo asserted that "it should be a comfort knowing that there exists a specialized class of people who have dedicated their lives to understanding the intricacies of, say, tax credits for the poor or the diplomatic intrigues of the Caucasus." It was unclear whether folks should feel "comforted" before or after being fined or jailed. That review should have included the favorite quote of Washington officialdom from Reagan's National Security Advisor Alexander Haig: "If you knew everything I know, you'd agree with everything I'm about to say."

The issue is not whether political appointees have higher IQs than citizens under their sway. Instead, the question is whether their presumed brilliance outweighs bureaucracies' refusal to recognize or reveal problems and failures. Policymakers must practically be able to see in the dark better than average citizens perceive their own lives.

Paternalism often presumes that bureaucrats have a stronger incentive to assist people than those people have to take care of themselves. But prevailing administrative routines do not inspire confidence on federal rescue missions. Government programs fizzle dollars in part because officials are spending other people's money. It was an English proverb 400 years ago that "the king's cheese goes half away in parings."

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it," quipped novelist Upton Sinclair in 1935. Actually, a person's thinking is Washingtonized when he is no longer able to recognize any harms the government inflicts. Government intervention is a cornucopia for politicians and bureaucrats regardless of what happens to purported beneficiaries. Washington continues becoming richer and more powerful despite - or perhaps because of - the dismal batting average of federal interventions.

American democracy has been betrayed by the experts who claimed that permitting politicians to capture nearly unlimited power would not radically change the relationship between the rulers and the ruled. If people are unfit to care for themselves, there is no reason to presume they are fit to choose caretakers. The doctrines currently driving federal policy almost ensure ever greater degradation of the intended beneficiaries. Token choices on Election Day will be followed by ever more dictates each day of the year.

Rather than benevolent bureaucracies, we have no-fault pseudo-benevolence. But as American Bar Association president Smythe Gambrell warned in 1955, "By every step we take toward making the government caretaker of our life, we move toward making it our master."

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

The bearded man in the cowboy hat who talked his way onto Seattle porches as "Brian" was, according to a KING 5 investigation, an Irishman ICE had already arrested in Boston and deported to Ireland on July 16, 2025. Five months later, the station reports, he was knocking on homeowner David Diedrick's door.

KING 5's investigators say sources in Ireland and the UK identified "Brian" as Bernard "Bernie" McDonagh, 42, and that the Department of Homeland Security confirmed the identification. ICE had described him as being in the country illegally when it picked him up in July 2025. "He pretty much just turned around and came back," Diedrick told the station.

The pitch, as Diedrick tells it, was a small one. "Brian" stopped him on the sidewalk and said the chimney "could use some work," quoting a job on the top three rows and a cap. Diedrick figured anything under $5,000 was manageable. Once work began, the problems multiplied, the whole chimney came down, and the number became $22,000. "It's January. It's raining," Diedrick said.

He got off lightly. Another homeowner told KING 5 of losing nearly $200,000 to the same man, and said that halfway through the job his company's name changed from TrueCraft Masonry to Flex Roofing and Repairs. McDonagh has not been charged with anything in the US, and he did not respond to KING 5's calls or to a letter delivered to his home in the UK, which the station says was signed for by the woman sources identify as his wife.

One Of Dozens

Investigators describe McDonagh as one face of something much larger. Law enforcement has called it a "crime ring" of dozens of men with Irish accents working homeowners across the country, most recently in the Pacific Northwest, with losses estimated in the tens of millions of dollars, according to KING 5. The men rotate names and business names, sometimes impersonating legitimate companies, hand out flyers promising licensed and bonded work, then manufacture problem after problem once the job starts.

The station says it has now spoken with 50 victims in the Seattle area alone. In August it confronted a crew whose porch job in Bellevue had climbed to $47,000 (the company on its paperwork has not been charged), and after the report aired the crew fled town.

McDonagh's past fits a rougher picture than the charming contractor. In 2021, The Irish Times reported that a Bernie McDonagh, then 37, of Ballyvolane, was charged in Cork District Court with possessing offensive weapons after men armed with machetes descended on a rival family during a feud in which a shot was reported fired. Gardai alleged in court that CCTV showed him discarding weapons as he got out of a car, and a judge refused him bail. KING 5 says that is the same man.

Where Are The Arrests?

The federal government knows the playbook. The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center recognizes the "Traveling Conmen Fraud Group" as a transnational organized crime group whose members are typically Irish or UK nationals who overstayed tourist visas or, more commonly, entered illegally, according to the US Attorney's Office in Rhode Island. In April that office got a 56-month federal sentence for John O'Brien, an Irish national living in the US unlawfully, who admitted defrauding homeowners in Rhode Island and Massachusetts of more than $1.5 million.

The O'Brien case ran on the same script. He told an 83-year-old Warwick man he had spotted cracks in his foundation, took $9,500, then "discovered" more damage and asked for another $80,000. A home inspector hired by prosecutors found no evidence the foundation needed the repairs. O'Brien is expected to be deported after his sentence.

In Washington, DHS took over all the Seattle-area cases after KING 5's first reports, through its investigations unit, which is separate from ICE. Officials told the station these cases take time and that they want the evidence in hand before going to prosecutors. So far, KING 5 says, it knows of no arrests.

That is the part Diedrick can't get past. He contrasted the resources spent deporting people "here working hard, trying to make a living" with McDonagh: "someone like this [McDonagh] who is already here illegally and is scamming people and has been arrested, and now is back. That's really frustrating to hear."

Authored by Timothy Frudd via The Epoch Times,

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has issued new guidance authorizing the National Guard to use military tactical vehicles, dozens of patrol cars, boat assets, and other equipment to support law enforcement operations in Washington.

The War Department confirmed the new guidance when asked about reports concerning a pair of Hegseth directives issued on Oct. 29 aimed at strengthening National Guard patrols in Washington. The new authorization comes as President Donald Trump's deployment of thousands of National Guard members in support of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force has continued to face legal challenges.

"The Secretary of War has authorized the continued use of National Guard personnel and capabilities in support of the Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful mission," a War Department official told The Epoch Times on Nov. 6.

"The October 29, 2026, guidance authorizes the use of up to 60 marked patrol cars, military tactical vehicles, up to 20 light towers and generators, and D.C. National Guard maritime boat assets in support of federal and local law enforcement operations."

The Epoch Times reached out to the White House for additional comment, but was referred to the Department of War.

Trump deployed the National Guard to Washington in August 2025, saying that the city was "under siege from violent crime" and suggesting that Washington's local government had "lost control of public order and safety."

The Pentagon previously confirmed in July that the mission for which the National Guard was deployed to Washington had been extended until Jan. 20, 2029, or until terminated by the president. The Pentagon projected in August that the extended deployment could cost an additional $1.4 billion.

Prior to the mission's extension, Hegseth credited National Guard members serving in support of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force for what he described as a "staggering" crime drop in Washington.

Metropolitan Police Department crime statistics from Jan. 1 to Nov. 6 show that homicides have dropped by 26 percent compared with the same period last year. Additionally, motor vehicle thefts have decreased by 40 percent, property crimes by 14 percent, and robberies by 2 percent.

While total crime is down 11 percent from last year, the number of assaults with a dangerous weapon has increased by 39 percent. Total violent crime has also increased by 12 percent from last year.

The president's deployment of the National Guard in Washington has been met with criticism and legal pushback from Democrats.

In Nov. 2025, Judge Jia Cobb of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled against Trump's National Guard deployment in Washington, saying that he overstepped his authority. However, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit paused the ruling, allowing the troops to remain in Washington while the case is litigated.

A three-judge appeals panel heard arguments on Oct. 14 from both D.C. government and Trump administration attorneys regarding the legality of the deployment.

U.S. government attorney Eric McArthur argued that Trump has authority to deploy the National Guard under the 1889 D.C. Militia Code. He told the court that the National Guard deployment has been "a striking success, with even the D.C. mayor acknowledging the dramatic decrease in violent crime since the deployments began."

Meanwhile, D.C. attorney Mitchell Reich argued that the president is only authorized to deploy the National Guard under limited circumstances under the Militia Code.

On Nov. 5, Brooke Pinto, a Democratic D.C. council member and chair of the public safety committee, called on newly elected Democratic lawmakers to recall National Guard troops from Washington following the midterm elections.

"I am very hopeful and optimistic that we now have the partners we need at the state and congressional level to push back and demand that this unnecessary, harmful, and unlawful military presence be removed from the district," she said.

Pinto specifically urged the Democratic governors-elect in Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, and Texas to withdraw their National Guard troops after they take office. The councilwoman noted that the five states currently have a total of 628 troops in Washington.

"We are calling on them to withdraw their troops immediately, and it's something they can do [on] their first day in office," she said.

Undersea telecom cables are critical civilian infrastructure and are increasingly under threat. The wars in Ukraine and Iran have shown how civilian infrastructure can become easy targets. 

On Friday, the Financial Times, citing maritime intelligence firm Windward, reported that several Iran-linked vessels slowed or lingered over cable routes in the Gulf of Oman as cable-cutting threats rise. For Gulf-allied states, the challenge is both to protect the cables from sabotage and to keep data centers humming amid Iranian drone threats. 

It's not just cable-cutting threats in the Gulf. Remember in 2024 when Baltic undersea cables were severed between Finland and Germany, causing weeks of "disruption." 

There must be a solution to cable sabotage that could bring parts of the internet down for days, if not weeks, and that solution might be Elon Musk's Starlink. 

Musk joined Ron Baron of Baron Capital on Friday afternoon to discuss several topics, including Starlink buildout and bandwidth, SpaceX Starship launches, the mega AI-chip plant called Terafab, and, of course, with Democrats set to control Congress, the future of orbital compute. 

Keeping our focus on what could be the best solution to undersea telecom cables. Well, Musk told Ron: "Starlink version 4 will have 10x the capability of V3 (which itself is 10x better than V2), especially with the long-distance laser links. Our next-gen laser links will be 10-terabits per second. 100x better. And we'll put 10 of them on."

The clip of Musk and Baron was shared on X by Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt, in which Musk responded and said, "100 lasers per satellite, each operating above 10 Tb/s, with over 100k satellites should be able to outcompete undersea cables," adding, "Speed of light in space is ~40% faster than cable and the path is direct, instead of following the outline of land masses." 

In other words, Starlink is building a parallel internet backbone in low Earth orbit that would make it much harder for foreign adversaries to sever critical undersea cables, whether with a ship dragging an anchor, a covert special operations team, or a proxy group. This will certaintly suggest that the next domain of warfare in the 2030s is space. 

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Andrew Korybko's Newsletter,

He just has to "creatively coerce" Europe and Ukraine through "plausibly deniable" means...

Putin confirmed that the next trilateral Russian-US-Ukrainian talks will be held in Abu Dhabi from 10-11 November. Earlier that same day, Trump's Special Envoy to Russia Jared Kushner published a detailed post on X about his boss' envisaged peace. It included the "five principal goals" of "permanent security consultations, reliable crisis communications, greater military transparency, reciprocal measures to reduce escalation risks, and an enduring framework for long-term European security and stability."

President Trump today advanced an important discussion with several European leaders about the need for a broader European security architecture that can help establish the conditions for lasting peace.

Building on his leadership and the substantive work undertaken this week in... https://t.co/jZ9uAQnkd4

— Jared Kushner (@jaredkushner) November 6, 2026

Kushner also declared that "Any arrangements must fully respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independent decision-making of every nation. Each country will retain authority over its own security and alliances, and no country would have a veto over another's sovereign choices. NATO will remain central to European collective defense, and this initiative would build upon existing institutions and commitments." This vision for the post-war European security architecture is actually quite realistic.

In fact, the gist of the one that was recently detailed here could suffice, albeit with one important modification in light of Kushner stating that the US will "fully respect...(the) independent decision-making of every nation." Instead of the US demanding that all pre-1997 NATO members withdraw their forces from all post-1997 ones, possibly exempting its own in Poland where it's exploring a permanent military base, it won't explicitly make this a condition for peace but could coerce them into this decision.

The way of doing so was outlined here a week after the abovementioned analysis, and it's for the US to declare that it'll radically curtail its export of energy to the EU by a specific date in the near future in order to redirect fuel to the domestic market. So as not to leave them in the lurch, they'd be told to resume Russian pipeline imports in which the US would have partial stakes as a "political safeguard" per a deal with Russia if the EU releases its frozen assets as proposed here, which would compensate.

The redeployment of pre-1997 NATO states' forces to post-1997 NATO states would be punished by Russia cutting off US-invested pipeline exports with Washington's approval. Likewise, the US could coerce Ukraine into socio-political concessions regarding the linguistic and religious rights that Russia has demanded as part of its denazification agenda by announcing that it'll soon radically curtail EU-funded "Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List" (PURL) arms exports in order to bolster the US' own stockpiles.

Reducing domestic fuel prices and bolstering stockpiles with a view towards possibly using Ukrainian-destined equipment in Ibero-America in alignment with the National Security Strategy's prioritization of the region (Third Gulf War-depleted stockpiles aren't of much use there) are America First policies. They're therefore sensible, in line with Trump's agenda, and importantly "plausibly deniable" means for coercing European NATO and Ukraine into these crucial concessions that are required for a lasting peace.

Russia is expected to implement the legal workaround proposed here in summer 2025 to formally end the conflict without obtaining full control over the disputed regions due to prioritizing this post-war European security architecture. Russia's restored complex economic interdependence with the EU and Ukraine in which the US would have stakes coupled with a resource-centric strategic partnership with the US would keep the peace. All of this is realistic if Trump has the will to coerce Europe and Ukraine.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.