Rockwell: The Unique Evil Of The Left

Authored by Llewellyn Rockwell,

[Originally published July 18, 2016.]

Is it too much to say that since the French Revolution, the left has been the source of virtually all political evils, and continues to be so in our day?

There can be no doubt that great cruelty and violence can be and have been inflicted in the name of preserving the existing order.

But when we compare even the worst enormities of the more distant past with the leftist totalitarian revolutions and total wars of the twentieth centuries, they are in general a mere blip. The entire history of the Inquisition, said Joe Sobran, barely rises to the level of what the communists accomplished on a good afternoon.

The French Revolution, and particularly its radical phase, was the classic manifestation of modern leftism and served as the model for still more radical revolutions around the world more than a century later.

As that revolution proceeded its aims grew more ambitious, with its most fervent partisans demanding nothing less than the total transformation of society.

In place of the various customs and settled ways of a France with well over a millennium of history behind it, the radical revolutionaries introduced a “rational” alternative cooked up in their heads, and with all the warmth of an insane asylum.

Streets named after saints were given new names, and statues of saints were actually guillotined. (These people guillotining statues were the rational ones, you understand.) The calendar itself, rich with religious feasts, was replaced by a more “rational” calendar with 30 days per month, divided into three ten-day weeks, thereby doing away with Sunday. The remaining five days of the year were devoted to secular observances: celebrations of labor, opinion, genius, virtue, and rewards.

Punishments for deviations from the new dispensation were as severe as we have come to expect from leftism. People were sentenced to death for owning a Rosary, giving shelter to a priest, or indeed refusing to abjure the priesthood.

We are plenty familiar with the guillotine, but the revolutionaries concocted still other forms of execution as well, like the Drownings at Nantes, designed to humiliate and terrorize their victims.

Given that the left has sought the complete transformation of society, and given that such wholesale change is bound to come up against the resistance of ordinary people who don’t care for having their routines and patterns of life overturned, we should not be surprised that the instrument of mass terror has been the weapon of choice. The people must be terrified into submission, and so broken and demoralized that resistance comes to seem impossible.

Likewise, it’s no wonder the left needs the total state. In place of naturally occurring groupings and allegiances, it demands the substitution of artificial constructs. In place of the concrete and specific, the Burkean “little platoons” that emerge organically, it imposes remote and artificial substitutes that emerge from the heads of intellectuals. It prefers the distant central government to the local neighborhood, the school board president over the head of household.

Thus the creation of the departments, totally subordinate to Paris, during the French Revolution was a classic leftist move. But so were the totalitarian megastates of the twentieth century, which demanded that people’s allegiances be transferred from the smaller associations that had once defined their lives to a brand new central authority that had grown out of nowhere.

The right (properly understood), meanwhile, according to the great classical liberal Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “stands for free, organically grown forms of life.”

The right stands for liberty, a free, unprejudiced form of thinking; a readiness to preserve traditional values (provided they are true values); a balanced view of the nature of man, seeing in him neither beast nor angel, insisting on the uniqueness of human beings which cannot be transformed into or treated as mere numbers or ciphers. The left is the advocate of the opposite principles; it is the enemy of diversity and the fanatical promoter of identity. Uniformity is stressed in all leftist utopias, paradises in which everybody is the same, envy is dead, and the enemy is either dead, lives outside the gates, or is utterly humiliated. Leftism loathes differences, deviations, stratifications. ... The word “one” is its symbol: one language, one race, one class, one ideology, one ritual, one type of school, one law for everybody, one flag, one coat of arms, one centralized world state.

Is Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s description partly out of date? After all, who touts their allegiance to “diversity” more than the left? But the left’s version of diversity amounts to uniformity of an especially insidious kind. No one may hold a dissenting view about the desirability of “diversity” itself, of course, and “diverse” college faculties are chosen not for their diversity of viewpoints but precisely for their dreary sameness: left-liberals of all shapes and sizes. What’s more, by demanding “diversity” and proportional representation in as many institutions as possible, the left aims to make all of America exactly the same.

Leftists have long been engaged in a bait-and-switch operation. First, they said they wanted nothing but liberty for all. Liberalism was supposed to be neutral between competing worldviews, seeking only an open marketplace of ideas in which rational people could discuss important questions. It did not aim to impose any particular vision of the good.

That claim was exploded quickly enough when the centrality of government-run education to the left-liberal program became obvious. Progressive education in particular aimed to emancipate children from the superstitions of competing power centers (parents, church, or locality, among others) and transfer their allegiance to the central state.

Of course, the leftist yearning for equality and uniformity played a role as well. There is the story of the French Minister of Education who, looking at his watch, tells a guest, “At this moment in 5,431 public elementary schools, they are writing an essay on the joys of winter.”

As Kuehnelt-Leddihn put it:

Church schools, parochial schools, private schools, personal tutors, none is in keeping with leftist sentiments. The reasons are manifold. Not only is delight in statism involved, but also the idea of uniformity and equality — the idea that social differences in education should be eliminated and all pupils be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type of information, in the same fashion, and to the same degree. This should enable them to think in identical or at least in similar ways.

As time has passed, leftists have bothered less and less to pretend to be neutral between competing social visions. This is why conservatives who accuse the left of moral relativism have it so wrong. Far from relativistic, the left is absolutist in its demands of conformity to strict moral codes.

For example, when it declares “transgender” persons to be the new oppressed class, everyone is expected to stand up and salute. Left-liberals do not argue that support for transgender people may be a good idea for some people but bad for others. That’s what they’d say if they were moral relativists. But they’re not, so they don’t.

And it is not simply that dissent is not tolerated. Dissent cannot be acknowledged. What happens is not that the offender is debated until a satisfactory resolution is achieved. He is drummed out of polite society without further ado. There can be no opinion apart from what the left has decided.

Now it’s true: the left can’t remind us often enough of the tolerant, non-judgmental millennials from whom this world of ubiquitous bigotry can learn so much. So am I wrong to say that the left, and particularly the younger left, is intolerant?

In fact, we are witnessing the least tolerant generation in recent memory. April Kelly-Woessner, a political scientist at Elizabethtown College who has researched the opinions of the millennials, has come up with some revealing findings. If we base how tolerant a person is on how he treats those he disagrees with — an obviously reasonable standard — the millennials fare very poorly.

Yes, the millennials have great sympathy for the official victim groups whose causes are paraded before them in school and at the movies. That’s no accomplishment since millennials agree with these people. But how do they treat and think about those with whom they disagree? A casual glance at social media, or at leftist outbursts on college campuses, reveals the answer.

Incidentally, who was the last leftist speaker shouted down by libertarians on a college campus?

Answer: no one, because that never happens. If it did, you can bet we’d be hearing about it until the end of time.

On the other hand, leftists who terrorize their ideological opponents are simply being faithful to the mandate of Herbert Marcuse, the 1960s leftist who argued that freedom of speech had to be restricted in the case of anti-progressive movements:

Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled. As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for “the other side,” I maintain that there are issues where either there is no “other side” in any more than a formalistic sense, or where “the other side” is demonstrably “regressive” and impedes possible improvement of the human condition. To tolerate propaganda for inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive political philosophy.

Even much of what passes as conservatism today is tainted by leftism. That’s certainly the case with the neoconservatives: can you imagine Edmund Burke, the fountainhead of modern conservatism, supporting the idea of military force to spread human rights around the world?

Talk to neoconservatives about decentralization, secession, nullification, and you’ll get exactly the same left-wing replies you’d hear on MSNBC.

Now I can imagine the following objection to what I’ve said: whatever we may say about the crimes and horrors of the left, we cannot overlook the totalitarianism of the right, manifested most spectacularly in Nazi Germany.

But in fact, the Nazis were a leftist party. The German Workers’ Party in Austria, the forerunner of the Nazis, declared in 1904: “We are a liberty-loving nationalistic party that fights energetically against reactionary tendencies as well as feudal, clerical, or capitalistic privileges and all alien influences.”

When the party became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party or the Nazis, its program included the following:

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party is not a worker’s party in the narrow sense of the term: It represents the interests of all honestly creative labor. It is a liberty-loving and strictly nationalist party and therefore fights against all reactionary trends, against ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and capitalist privileges and every alien influence, but above all against the overpowering influence of the Jewish-commercial mentality in all domains of public life. ...

It demands the amalgamation of all regions of Europe inhabited by Germans into a democratic, social-minded German Reich. ...

It demands plebiscites for all key laws in the Reich, the states and provinces. ...

It demands the elimination of the rule of Jewish bankers over business life and the creation of national people’s banks with a democratic administration.

This program, wrote Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “oozes the spirit of leveling leftism: it was democratic; it was anti-Habsburg (it demanded the destruction of the Danube monarchy in favor of the Pan-German program); it was against all unpopular minorities, an attitude that is the magnetism of all leftist ideologies.”

The leftist obsession with “equality” and leveling means the state must insinuate itself into employment, finance, education, private clubs — pretty much every nook and cranny of civil society. In the name of diversity, every institution is forced to look exactly like every other one.

The left can’t ever be satisfied because its creed is a permanent revolution in the service of unattainable ends like “equality.” People of different skills and endowments will reap different rewards, which means constant intervention into civil society. Moreover, equality vanishes the moment people begin freely exchanging money for the goods they desire, so again: the state must be involved in everything, at all times.

Moreover, each generation of liberals undermines and scoffs at what the previous one took for granted. The revolution marches on.

Leftism is, in short, a recipe for permanent revolution, and of a distinctly anti-libertarian kind. Not just anti-libertarian. Anti-human.

And yet all the hatred these days is directed at the right.

To be sure, libertarians are fully at home neither on the left nor the right as traditionally understood. But the idea that both sides are equally dreadful, or amount to comparable threats to liberty, is foolish and destructive nonsense.

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

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 23:20

Rockwell: The Unique Evil Of The Left

Authored by Llewellyn Rockwell,

[Originally published July 18, 2016.]

Is it too much to say that since the French Revolution, the left has been the source of virtually all political evils, and continues to be so in our day?

There can be no doubt that great cruelty and violence can be and have been inflicted in the name of preserving the existing order.

But when we compare even the worst enormities of the more distant past with the leftist totalitarian revolutions and total wars of the twentieth centuries, they are in general a mere blip. The entire history of the Inquisition, said Joe Sobran, barely rises to the level of what the communists accomplished on a good afternoon.

The French Revolution, and particularly its radical phase, was the classic manifestation of modern leftism and served as the model for still more radical revolutions around the world more than a century later.

As that revolution proceeded its aims grew more ambitious, with its most fervent partisans demanding nothing less than the total transformation of society.

In place of the various customs and settled ways of a France with well over a millennium of history behind it, the radical revolutionaries introduced a “rational” alternative cooked up in their heads, and with all the warmth of an insane asylum.

Streets named after saints were given new names, and statues of saints were actually guillotined. (These people guillotining statues were the rational ones, you understand.) The calendar itself, rich with religious feasts, was replaced by a more “rational” calendar with 30 days per month, divided into three ten-day weeks, thereby doing away with Sunday. The remaining five days of the year were devoted to secular observances: celebrations of labor, opinion, genius, virtue, and rewards.

Punishments for deviations from the new dispensation were as severe as we have come to expect from leftism. People were sentenced to death for owning a Rosary, giving shelter to a priest, or indeed refusing to abjure the priesthood.

We are plenty familiar with the guillotine, but the revolutionaries concocted still other forms of execution as well, like the Drownings at Nantes, designed to humiliate and terrorize their victims.

Given that the left has sought the complete transformation of society, and given that such wholesale change is bound to come up against the resistance of ordinary people who don’t care for having their routines and patterns of life overturned, we should not be surprised that the instrument of mass terror has been the weapon of choice. The people must be terrified into submission, and so broken and demoralized that resistance comes to seem impossible.

Likewise, it’s no wonder the left needs the total state. In place of naturally occurring groupings and allegiances, it demands the substitution of artificial constructs. In place of the concrete and specific, the Burkean “little platoons” that emerge organically, it imposes remote and artificial substitutes that emerge from the heads of intellectuals. It prefers the distant central government to the local neighborhood, the school board president over the head of household.

Thus the creation of the departments, totally subordinate to Paris, during the French Revolution was a classic leftist move. But so were the totalitarian megastates of the twentieth century, which demanded that people’s allegiances be transferred from the smaller associations that had once defined their lives to a brand new central authority that had grown out of nowhere.

The right (properly understood), meanwhile, according to the great classical liberal Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “stands for free, organically grown forms of life.”

The right stands for liberty, a free, unprejudiced form of thinking; a readiness to preserve traditional values (provided they are true values); a balanced view of the nature of man, seeing in him neither beast nor angel, insisting on the uniqueness of human beings which cannot be transformed into or treated as mere numbers or ciphers. The left is the advocate of the opposite principles; it is the enemy of diversity and the fanatical promoter of identity. Uniformity is stressed in all leftist utopias, paradises in which everybody is the same, envy is dead, and the enemy is either dead, lives outside the gates, or is utterly humiliated. Leftism loathes differences, deviations, stratifications. ... The word “one” is its symbol: one language, one race, one class, one ideology, one ritual, one type of school, one law for everybody, one flag, one coat of arms, one centralized world state.

Is Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s description partly out of date? After all, who touts their allegiance to “diversity” more than the left? But the left’s version of diversity amounts to uniformity of an especially insidious kind. No one may hold a dissenting view about the desirability of “diversity” itself, of course, and “diverse” college faculties are chosen not for their diversity of viewpoints but precisely for their dreary sameness: left-liberals of all shapes and sizes. What’s more, by demanding “diversity” and proportional representation in as many institutions as possible, the left aims to make all of America exactly the same.

Leftists have long been engaged in a bait-and-switch operation. First, they said they wanted nothing but liberty for all. Liberalism was supposed to be neutral between competing worldviews, seeking only an open marketplace of ideas in which rational people could discuss important questions. It did not aim to impose any particular vision of the good.

That claim was exploded quickly enough when the centrality of government-run education to the left-liberal program became obvious. Progressive education in particular aimed to emancipate children from the superstitions of competing power centers (parents, church, or locality, among others) and transfer their allegiance to the central state.

Of course, the leftist yearning for equality and uniformity played a role as well. There is the story of the French Minister of Education who, looking at his watch, tells a guest, “At this moment in 5,431 public elementary schools, they are writing an essay on the joys of winter.”

As Kuehnelt-Leddihn put it:

Church schools, parochial schools, private schools, personal tutors, none is in keeping with leftist sentiments. The reasons are manifold. Not only is delight in statism involved, but also the idea of uniformity and equality — the idea that social differences in education should be eliminated and all pupils be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type of information, in the same fashion, and to the same degree. This should enable them to think in identical or at least in similar ways.

As time has passed, leftists have bothered less and less to pretend to be neutral between competing social visions. This is why conservatives who accuse the left of moral relativism have it so wrong. Far from relativistic, the left is absolutist in its demands of conformity to strict moral codes.

For example, when it declares “transgender” persons to be the new oppressed class, everyone is expected to stand up and salute. Left-liberals do not argue that support for transgender people may be a good idea for some people but bad for others. That’s what they’d say if they were moral relativists. But they’re not, so they don’t.

And it is not simply that dissent is not tolerated. Dissent cannot be acknowledged. What happens is not that the offender is debated until a satisfactory resolution is achieved. He is drummed out of polite society without further ado. There can be no opinion apart from what the left has decided.

Now it’s true: the left can’t remind us often enough of the tolerant, non-judgmental millennials from whom this world of ubiquitous bigotry can learn so much. So am I wrong to say that the left, and particularly the younger left, is intolerant?

In fact, we are witnessing the least tolerant generation in recent memory. April Kelly-Woessner, a political scientist at Elizabethtown College who has researched the opinions of the millennials, has come up with some revealing findings. If we base how tolerant a person is on how he treats those he disagrees with — an obviously reasonable standard — the millennials fare very poorly.

Yes, the millennials have great sympathy for the official victim groups whose causes are paraded before them in school and at the movies. That’s no accomplishment since millennials agree with these people. But how do they treat and think about those with whom they disagree? A casual glance at social media, or at leftist outbursts on college campuses, reveals the answer.

Incidentally, who was the last leftist speaker shouted down by libertarians on a college campus?

Answer: no one, because that never happens. If it did, you can bet we’d be hearing about it until the end of time.

On the other hand, leftists who terrorize their ideological opponents are simply being faithful to the mandate of Herbert Marcuse, the 1960s leftist who argued that freedom of speech had to be restricted in the case of anti-progressive movements:

Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled. As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for “the other side,” I maintain that there are issues where either there is no “other side” in any more than a formalistic sense, or where “the other side” is demonstrably “regressive” and impedes possible improvement of the human condition. To tolerate propaganda for inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive political philosophy.

Even much of what passes as conservatism today is tainted by leftism. That’s certainly the case with the neoconservatives: can you imagine Edmund Burke, the fountainhead of modern conservatism, supporting the idea of military force to spread human rights around the world?

Talk to neoconservatives about decentralization, secession, nullification, and you’ll get exactly the same left-wing replies you’d hear on MSNBC.

Now I can imagine the following objection to what I’ve said: whatever we may say about the crimes and horrors of the left, we cannot overlook the totalitarianism of the right, manifested most spectacularly in Nazi Germany.

But in fact, the Nazis were a leftist party. The German Workers’ Party in Austria, the forerunner of the Nazis, declared in 1904: “We are a liberty-loving nationalistic party that fights energetically against reactionary tendencies as well as feudal, clerical, or capitalistic privileges and all alien influences.”

When the party became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party or the Nazis, its program included the following:

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party is not a worker’s party in the narrow sense of the term: It represents the interests of all honestly creative labor. It is a liberty-loving and strictly nationalist party and therefore fights against all reactionary trends, against ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and capitalist privileges and every alien influence, but above all against the overpowering influence of the Jewish-commercial mentality in all domains of public life. ...

It demands the amalgamation of all regions of Europe inhabited by Germans into a democratic, social-minded German Reich. ...

It demands plebiscites for all key laws in the Reich, the states and provinces. ...

It demands the elimination of the rule of Jewish bankers over business life and the creation of national people’s banks with a democratic administration.

This program, wrote Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “oozes the spirit of leveling leftism: it was democratic; it was anti-Habsburg (it demanded the destruction of the Danube monarchy in favor of the Pan-German program); it was against all unpopular minorities, an attitude that is the magnetism of all leftist ideologies.”

The leftist obsession with “equality” and leveling means the state must insinuate itself into employment, finance, education, private clubs — pretty much every nook and cranny of civil society. In the name of diversity, every institution is forced to look exactly like every other one.

The left can’t ever be satisfied because its creed is a permanent revolution in the service of unattainable ends like “equality.” People of different skills and endowments will reap different rewards, which means constant intervention into civil society. Moreover, equality vanishes the moment people begin freely exchanging money for the goods they desire, so again: the state must be involved in everything, at all times.

Moreover, each generation of liberals undermines and scoffs at what the previous one took for granted. The revolution marches on.

Leftism is, in short, a recipe for permanent revolution, and of a distinctly anti-libertarian kind. Not just anti-libertarian. Anti-human.

And yet all the hatred these days is directed at the right.

To be sure, libertarians are fully at home neither on the left nor the right as traditionally understood. But the idea that both sides are equally dreadful, or amount to comparable threats to liberty, is foolish and destructive nonsense.

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

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 23:20

'The Science': Catastrophic Failure & Unforgivable Arrogance

Via Camus,

The American scientific establishment, led by figures like Anthony Fauci, was given absolute authority to manage the pandemic.

They got everything they demanded.

As Glenn Greenwald details, their legacy is one of catastrophic failure and unforgivable arrogance.

The American scientific establishment, led by figures like Anthony Fauci, was given absolute authority to manage the pandemic. They got everything they demanded.

As Glenn Greenwald details, their legacy is one of catastrophic failure and unforgivable arrogance. They imposed… pic.twitter.com/sHC7zYw1Fx

— Camus (@newstart_2024) September 12, 2025

They imposed moronic policies: forced masks, mandated vaccines, and the utterly idiotic 6-foot social distancing rule that turned out to be a complete joke.

They shuttered schools with zero regard for the devastating consequences to children.

They lied about COVID’s origins and banished all dissent, colluding with tech giants to deplatform anyone who questioned their orthodoxies—many of which were later proven completely false.

The result?

The United States suffered one of the highest death tolls in the world.

The experts we were commanded to venerate without question failed radically.

Their failure wasn’t just due to error, but to deep-seated arrogance and systemic deceit.

Now, the same institutions wonder why the American people have lost all trust in them.

They continue to act with insularity, as if their decrees still come from Mount Olympus.

But the public has seen the truth: our ruling class is not scientific—they are political and self-preserving.

Their unaccountability is the greatest scandal of all.4

*  *  *

Looking for quick and easy Rancher-Direct suggestions before tonight's deadline (Midnight EST)? 

Steak Lover's Bundle - the steaks, the whole steaks, and nothing but the steaks (top seller)

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Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 21:35

Weekend:
• Schedule for Week of September 14, 2025

• FOMC Preview: 25bps Rate Cut Expected

Monday:
• At 8:30 AM ET, The New York Fed Empire State manufacturing survey for September. The consensus is for a reading of 4.0, down from 11.9.

From CNBC: Pre-Market Data and Bloomberg futures S&P 500 are up 9 and DOW futures are up 82 (fair value).

Oil prices were up over the last week with WTI futures at $62.93 per barrel and Brent at $67.21 per barrel. A year ago, WTI was at $70, and Brent was at $74 - so WTI oil prices are down about 10% year-over-year.

Here is a graph from Gasbuddy.com for nationwide gasoline prices. Nationally prices are at $3.12 per gallon. A year ago, prices were at $3.15 per gallon, so gasoline prices are down $0.03 year-over-year.

Florida To Investigate Teachers Found Celebrating Charlie Kirk Assassination

Authored by T.J. Muscaro via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Florida’s Department of Education announced on Sept. 11 that it will look into public school teachers who, on social media, celebrated or justified the assassination of Turning Point USA CEO and founder Charlie Kirk.

The Florida Historic Capitol sits near the 22-story New Capitol building, which together are part of the Capitol Complex in Tallahassee, Fla., on July 26, 2023. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas sent a letter to school district superintendents telling them that he would be investigating after it was brought to his attention that some educators had posted “despicable comments on social media regarding the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk.”

“These few are not a reflection of the great, high-quality teachers who make up the vast majority of Florida’s educators,” he wrote.

“Nevertheless, I will be conducting an investigation of every educator who engages in this vile, sanctionable behavior.”

Florida’s Department of Education told The Epoch Times in an email that the commissioner was prepared to use all of his power to hold educators responsible if the investigation proves they should not be in a classroom based on their behavior.

That power includes revoking their educator certificate.

“Although educators have First Amendment rights, these rights do not extend without limit into their professional duties,” Kamoutsas said.

“An educator’s personal views that are made public may undermine the trust of the students and families that they serve.”

The commissioner cited Rule 6A-10.081 of the Florida Administrative Code (F.A.C.), titled “Principles of Professional Conduct for the Education Profession in Florida,” which holds the state’s certified educators to a set of ethical guidelines.

Kamoutsas said that a teacher could violate that rule if his or her conduct “causes a student or his or her family to feel unwelcome or unwilling to participate in the learning environment.”

He also cited sections of two Florida statutes that authorized the commissioner to discipline and sanction the certificate of an educator who “upon investigation, has been found guilty of personal conduct that seriously reduces that person’s effectiveness as an employee of the district school board.”

“Teachers are held to a higher standard as public servants and must ensure their conduct does not undermine the trust of the students and families they serve,” the commissioner said on X.

“We will hold teachers who choose to make disgusting comments about the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk accountable. Govern yourselves accordingly.”

The official action came after several voices across social media were raised to flag and speak out against people justifying or even cheering the assassination of the conservative influencer.

The social media app BlueSky was required to speak out against some of its users’ comments.

“Glorifying violence or harm violates Bluesky’s Community Guidelines,” the company said. “We review reports and take action on content that celebrates harm against anyone.

“Violence has no place in healthy public discourse, and we’re committed to fostering healthy, open conversations.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis praised Kamoutsas’s actions to hold the state’s teachers accountable.

“Celebrating the assassination of a 31-year-old father of two young kids is disturbing; that teachers would be among those who do so is completely unacceptable,” he said.

Since that announcement, several people began posting screenshots on X of teachers they caught publicly celebrating the assassination, and tagging Florida leaders and the respective school districts.

The Epoch Times reached out to the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), an organization known for defending First Amendment rights on school campuses across the country, to get its take on this move by the Sunshine State.

Senior Program Counsel Stephanie Jablonsky told The Epoch Times in an email on Sept. 12 that while public school teachers retain their First Amendment right to speak as private citizens on matters of public concern, they do not have unlimited protection. However, the actions could be seen as unconstitutional if termination of employment is solely based on the disapproval of a person’s opinion.

“If their off-the-clock speech genuinely undermines their ability to perform their duties or causes serious disruption in the workplace, discipline might be justified,” she said. ”But punishment based solely on disapproval of an employee’s private views is generally unconstitutional, and that’s what seems to be driving a spate of employment investigations and punishments in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s tragic murder.

“The assassination of Kirk as he spoke with students on a college campus was a shocking betrayal of our national commitment to free speech and open debate,” she added. ”Now’s the time to redouble our commitment to those fundamental values, not erode them by punishing people for their personal views.

“Free speech means protecting even the speech one finds repugnant.”

Florida was named No. 1 in education freedom for the fourth year in a row by the conservative Heritage Foundation on Sept. 9.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 21:00

These Are The Largest Immigrant Groups In America

The U.S. has long been a top destination for immigrants seeking better opportunities. As of 2023, nearly 48 million people in the country were born abroad, representing 14% of the country’s total population.

In this visualization, Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu breaks down the largest immigrant groups in America by nationality, highlighting the top 10 countries from each region.

Note that this analysis covers legal immigrants only. Check out our previous post to see a similar breakdown of illegal immigrants coming into the U.S.

Data & Discussion

The data for this visualization comes from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI). It shows the number of foreign-born U.S. residents by country of origin, as of 2023.

Americas: 25.3M Immigrants

Mexico stands out as the dominant source of U.S. immigrants, with nearly 11 million as of 2023. Historical ties, geographic proximity, and longstanding migration channels are major factors.

Several other Latin American countries rank highly, including El Salvador, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic.

Asia: 14.9M Immigrants

After the Americas, Asia & Oceania is the next largest source of U.S. immigrants.

India (2.9 million) is the second-largest country source after Mexico, while China (2.2 million) and the Philippines (2.05 million) also rank in the top five.

Fact: In 2024, Indian students accounted for nearly 30% of all international students in the U.S.

Europe: 4.8M Immigrants

While Europe was once the primary source of immigrants to America, its share has declined over time. The combined European total remains substantial, though spread across many countries.

Africa: 2.8M Immigrants

Africa is the region with the least amount of immigrants living in America.

According to historical MPI data, the annual number of new permanent residents from Africa has grown slowly and inconsistently. This could be due to closer ties between Africa and China.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Why Did Asian Immigrants Come to the U.S.? on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 20:25

Images, Words, & Narratives Matter

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” ― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“What we’ve got here is… failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it… well, he gets it. I don’t like it any more than you men.” – Captain – Cool Hand Luke

It is fitting that I use a quote from a communist to begin this article because it is the communist ideology of hate, murder, and propaganda that has led us to this point of no return. Charlie Kirk was right. America will never be the same. It might not even closely resemble the America at the start of this century by the time this period of upheaval and crisis resolves itself, with the shedding of much blood and death on a scale not seen since World War II. Charlie Kirk was Cool Hand Luke’d for daring to challenge the status quo and daring to question the psychopathic powers that be in this prison planet of our own making.

The senseless slaughter of Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk were the opening salvo in a new U.S. civil war, which is likely to spread to the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, Australia and wherever else the globalist elite have planted the seeds of revolution through importing Muslim hordes, criminalizing whiteness, glorifying deviancy, outlawing free speech, bankrupting nations, and promoting WW3. The chaos, confusion, vitriol and mayhem is not happening by chance. It is being manufactured by those constituting the invisible government (aka Deep State) as a means to their end game – Digital IDs, CBDCs, Social Credit Scores, 15 Minute Cities (Gulags), Great Taking leading to the Great Reset, and the depopulation of millions with the dehumanization and subjugation of the survivors.

What is happening is not a bug, but a feature in the new world order they envision. The last couple weeks certainly meet Lenin’s criteria of decades happening, as the whirlwind of tragedy, anger, threats, retribution, legacy media lies, political posturing, international coalitions forming into war-like postures, all capped off by the cold blooded murder of “that white girl” by a feral psychotic dangerous black man set loose by a black woman pretending to be a judge, and the assassination of an earnest young christian conservative man who was trying to sway minds and hearts through debate, evidently by an ANTIFA inspired transgender dropout loser who spent his life online with other losers.

I say evidently because I don’t believe anything the government or media tells me. There are dozens of unanswered questions regarding this 22 year old Tyler Robinson as the shooter. Based on what we have been told by the authorities regarding Thomas Crooks, the 20 year-old Butler assassin, I don’t expect any truthful revelations regarding Kirk’s assassin. An official narrative will be concocted, fed to the MSM mouthpieces, and devoured by the ignorant masses as the truth. Questioning the official story will be shouted down as conspiracy theories, even though the conspiracy theorists are now 40 – o versus the official stories over the last decade. Our lives don’t matter, but narratives do matter to those pulling the strings.

Even worse was the complete blackout of Iryna’s murder by the far left dying legacy media. The alt-media forced the world to witness the consequences of left wing policies of encouraging crime and refusing to lock up dangerous black men. False narratives are all the left have. The dying legacy left media live up to Huxley’s observations regarding the truth:

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” – Aldous Huxley

Personally, the images of that beautiful helpless girl staring in stunned terror at the savage beast who just slaughtered her because she was white, and the instantaneous death of Charlie with the blood pouring out of his neck wound have disturbed and haunted me for this entire week. I haven’t been able to sleep. I feel like I’ve been going through the motions at work and at home, as a feeling of foreboding envelopes my consciousnesses. I’m sure others have a similar feeling.

The last time I felt this way was the week following 9/11. I knew the world had changed and the change was not going to be good. The world has once again taken a turn for the worse. There will be no reconciliation between the right and the left. There will be no peace. There will be no turning the other cheek and coming together as a nation. Unification is impossible. You will be required to choose a side, because the violence has only just begun. It will only intensify from this point until there are clear winners and losers.

That young refugee from Ukraine was going home from her shift at a pizza joint. It’s ironic that she would have still been living peacefully in Ukraine if the U.S. had not initiated the hostilities by overthrowing the democratically elected government in 2014, as the neocon/Deep State plan to overthrow Putin by goading him into WW3 was hatched. The millions of deaths and casualties in Ukraine are directly attributable to the dastardly actions of Obama, Biden, Nuland, Graham, McCain and the rest of the warmongering bastards that instigated this war. That racist feral dog that murdered Iryna in cold blood shouldn’t have been on that train either. The left wing communist DAs and judges who released this violent unhinged savage 14 times have her blood on their hands. Both seats should have been empty, but that image of savagery will now encourage a race war.

I know every right leaning talking head, twitter influencer, blogger and politician has been mourning the death of Charlie Kirk on social media at a deafening crescendo, trying to outdo each other in their level of tributes, video compilations, and pictures of his wife and children. He is being treated as a Jesus-like martyr, with connotations of JFK’s Camelot lost. Some said he was destined to be president within the next decade. Maybe so, but we will never know.

Truthfully, until he was murdered this week, I knew very little about the man. I knew he was a popular right leaning commentator, but I had never heard him speak or followed him on twitter. I pretty much lumped him with the other right wing influencers, who make a living off tweets, podcasts, youtubes, and blogging. Everyone’s gotta make a living somehow. They are in a constant battle for likes, retweets, impressions and eyeballs. I’m always suspicious about whether they are paid to support a certain point of view or actually believe what they say.

He was 31 and I’m 62. His Turning Point USA organization was geared to mobilize idealistic young conservative people to embrace conservative family values. After 17 years of trying to change hearts and minds, my site generally attracts cynical old dudes who despise the government and media, knowing change through the ballot box is a fruitless venture. The best we can do now is tribe up with like minded people, gather our preps, make sure we are heavily armed, and buy more ammo. Nothing I’ve seen in the last couple weeks tells me to do otherwise. This train is moving too fast towards the bend, and derailment is a certainty.

From what I could gather, Charlie was an intelligent, loving Christian family man, who loved spirited debates with those who had opposing points of view.

His debating skills were clearly top-notch.

The left wing loons in the media, on college campuses, and in politics despised him because he was more intelligent and articulate in presenting his viewpoint, as they shrieked at, threatened and cancelled those who supported him. The brainwashing of our indoctrinated youth by left wing communist ideology has convinced millions to actually believe Kirk, Trump, Musk, Carlson, etc., are nazis and fascists – deserving to be murdered for their cause. Their warped ideology kills.

Kirk’s Turning Point USA non-profit is essentially a rounding error compared to the Soros NGOs, Gates Foundation, and USAID grifts funding chaos and hate across the land. I checked their 990 Tax return and total donations were $85M, with Kirk’s annual compensation around $400k. Pelosi makes more than that with one insider stock trade. He surely also made significant income from Twitter, podcasts, books, etc. But, he wasn’t what I would call a grifter.

His views pretty much aligned with mine on most major issues – Ukraine war, the Israeli genocide, bombing Iran for Israel, abortion, tranny degeneracy, woke indoctrination in schools, 1st Amendment, 2nd Amendment, covid vaccines, masks, Snowden & Assange, and the Deep State . He did not deserve to die and making him a martyr will ultimately backfire on those celebrating his murder. Cancellation goes both ways, they are finding out.

More people have now read and watched his speeches/debates in the last few days than would have ever been introduced to his views over their lifetimes. His death has created more anger and desire for retribution than I’ve witnessed in the course of my life. Will it be a Boston Tea Party/Fort Sumter moment, triggering a revolution/civil war? Time will tell, but we know one thing for sure, Fourth Turnings never de-intensify. I would say in this past week we have experienced an intensification of our ongoing crisis, with the bloodiest and most intense years yet to come. Tragic iconic photos from my lifetime have marked turning points for the country, and I believe the two photos above will sadly mark a new turning point of death and destruction.

I was six months old when my government murdered JFK. The images from the Zapruder film are disturbing and sad, but the murder of our young president because he threatened the CIA/FBI/Deep State changed the course of our country to the detriment of all but those constituting the Deep State and their billionaire benefactors. Our young have been dying, while those running the show have utilized all the propaganda tools at their disposal to breed hate and fear. Keeping the masses focused on their differences, ensures they don’t all realize the true enemy are those pulling the strings and manipulating the masses, as described by Edward Bernays.

Look at your young men fighting
Look at your women crying
Look at your young men dying
The way they’ve always done before
Look at the hate we’re breeding
Look at the fear we’re feeding
Look at the lives we’re leading
The way we’ve always done before

Civil War – Guns N’ Roses

And history hides the lies of our civil wars
D’you wear a black armband when they shot the man
Who said, “Peace could last forever”?
And in my first memories, they shot Kennedy
I went numb when I learned to see
Civil War – Guns N’ Roses

Two tragically iconic photos during the Vietnam War were turning points in convincing average Walter Cronkite watching Americans we should not be there, sacrificing our young men, killing women and children, and turning our military against college students protesting against another war fought by the poor to benefit the rich. The American empire has degenerated into Murder Inc., spreading death and destruction across the globe to enrich the military industrial complex and the parasite politicians fueling the war machine with our tax dollars, while burdening our children with an unpayable debt.

So I never fell for Vietnam
We got the wall in D.C. to remind us all
That you can’t trust freedom when it’s not in your hands
When everybody’s fightin’ for their promised land and
I don’t need your civil war
Civil War – Guns N’ Roses

The photos of the World Trade Center towers on fire shortly before collapsing into their footprint became the defining moment of this century, thus far. We know the neo-cons (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz) who used the moron baby Bush to kick-start their agenda by pushing through the pre-written Patriot Act, ushering in the ever expanding surveillance state, have seized control of government and set us on a path to destruction. We’ve been spilling blood across the globe, while adding debt at a hyper-sonic pace, based upon lies, corrupt leadership, and at the behest of a globalist billionaire death cult. And here we stand at the brink of a civil war and global conflict, with unknown but likely terrible consequences.

Look at the shoes you’re filling
Look at the blood we’re spilling
Look at the world we’re killing
The way we’ve always done before
Look in the doubt we’ve wallowed
Look at the leaders we’ve followed
Look at the lies we’ve swallowed
And I don’t want to hear no more
Civil War – Guns N’ Roses

We are currently in an existential battle between good and evil. The murderous bastards who killed Iryna and Charlie were the personification of evil, motivated by the satanic urging of the Soros, Gates, Obama, Clinton cult of death. The Democratic party is infested with evil men and women, hellbent on the destruction of our country through the promotion of depravity, social chaos, and rampant criminality without consequences. The real deplorables in this country who cheered Kirk’s death and felt sorry for the black devil who slaughtered “that white girl” are evil. The despicable excuses for journalists in the far left propaganda media are evil.

All of these people are your enemy. Many of your neighbors, coworkers and family are your enemy. They would not shed a tear at your death. We have passed the point of no return. I wish I could visualize a near term positive outcome, but that is impossible after this week. As another old time cynic declared a century ago, normal people need to hoist the black flag.

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” ― H.L. Mencken

A current day cynic, and someone the left would also like to kill,  captures my thoughts exactly. I will not unite or let bygones be bygones with people who wanted me to die for refusing the covid jab and would spit on my grave based upon my views on the Constitution, unwarranted wars, the welfare state, surveillance state, government spending, and the degeneracy of the left. We are already at war, but most don’t realize it yet.

We’ve tried to live in peace, minding our own business, turning the other cheek, and hoping the crazed leftists would fade away, because their ideas are evil and insane. We just wanted to be left alone, but they forced millions to get jabbed with Big Pharma poison under threat of being fired, hoisted their transgender deviancy upon our children, indoctrinated our young with communist bullshit in government schools, opened our borders to third world invaders, burned our cities while making a drug addicted black criminal their fake martyr, placed low IQ diversity stooges in key positions of power, encouraged criminality with no consequences, stole elections, and now they are killing the best of us. It is now time for all normal people to channel William Munny and do whatever is necessary to defeat the evil forces opposing us. Words matter, but actions speak louder than words.

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

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 19:50

DEA Seizes 7500Kg Of Coke, Arrests 617 Members Of Sinaloa Cartel In Global Operation

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reported last week that it had arrested 617 members of the Sinaloa cartel in a global operation.

The week-long operation aimed to dismantle the Sinaloa cartel, which has been flooding the United States with fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin, the DEA said in a statement.

In addition to the 617 arrests, the DEA seized narcotics, including 480 kilograms of fentanyl powder, 714,707 counterfeit pills, 2,209 kilograms of methamphetamine, 7,469 kilograms of cocaine, and 16.55 kilograms of heroin.

As Alicia Márquez reports below for The Epoch Times, the DEA also seized more than $11 million in currency, over $1.6 million worth of assets, and 420 firearms.

“These results demonstrate the DEA’s unwavering commitment to protecting the American people,” DEA Administrator Terrance Cole said.

“Every kilogram of poison seized, every dollar confiscated from the cartels, and every arrest we make represents lives saved and communities defended.”

“The DEA will not rest until the Sinaloa Cartel is completely dismantled,” he added.

The operation was carried out by DEA agents in 23 domestic field divisions and seven foreign regions from Aug. 25 to 29.

“There are tens of thousands of Sinaloa members, associates, and facilitators operating worldwide in at least 40 countries who are responsible for the production, manufacture, distribution, and operations related to the trafficking of dangerous and deadly synthetic drugs,” according to the statement.

“This coordinated action was a combination of the DEA’s increased focus on law enforcement, intelligence, and national and international collaboration, using all resources at its disposal to degrade the Sinaloa Cartel’s command and control.”

In February, the Trump administration, through the State Department, designated the Sinaloa cartel a Foreign Terrorist Organization, along with seven other Mexican and Latin American organizations.

Mexican Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch dismissed the idea that the Sinaloa cartel is finished.

“No, no, the Sinaloa Cartel has never had a leader as such, that is, there have always been several leaders,” Harfuch said at an Aug. 27 press conference.

Harfuch also spoke about the structure of the Sinaloa organization.

“It is a cartel that has, let’s say, several branches. One of them was Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada, another was ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, then El Chapo’s sons, El Guano, who is also El Chapo’s brother, and another, ‘El Chapo Isidro,’” Harfuch said, following Ismael Zambada García’s guilty plea in the United States.

On Aug. 25, Zambada, co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel, pleaded guilty in a New York federal court to two counts of drug trafficking, money laundering, and use of weapons, after more than five decades of criminal activity.

Zambada admitted to participating in a drug trafficking operation that for years brought large quantities of illicit substances, including cocaine and heroin, into the United States.

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 19:15

Oregon Is Hiding The Truth About Child Sex Changes

Authored by Paul Terdal via RealClearPolitics,

Here’s a question my home state of Oregon could easily answer: How many kids have received gender transition surgeries in the last 15 years? The state has this data and is required by law to give it to me. Yet instead of doing so, officials are now telling me that they’ve been illegally selling Oregonians’ health information for years. It’s a head-turning argument, but it’s also false. It shows how desperate the state is to avoid answering my question.

I have been a volunteer health consumer advocate for more than 20 years. I have led the development and passage of laws that guarantee insurance coverage of evidence-based autism services, end discrimination against disabled patients seeking organ transplants, and strengthen the insurance commissioner’s enforcement authority. I am also a lifelong Democrat, and as transgender medicine has come into vogue in recent years, I’ve worked to help my state implement evidence-based standards that protect kids.

The key to my work is the Oregon Health Authority’s “All Payer All Claims” database, which has detailed information about health transactions for more than 92% of the state’s population. By law, this data is available to the public, and to protect patients, it’s fully compliant with federal privacy laws and regulations. There is no way to identify any individual patient, full stop.

The Oregon Health Authority makes this data available for purchase, and a few years ago, I purchased access to the 2019 data for a federally funded study. I found that while Oregon had estimated that only about 175 patients would obtain taxpayer-funded gender transition services at a total annual cost of no more than $200,000, more than 7,585 patients had done so at more than 100 times the initial cost estimate. That included 160 children using “puberty blocker” drugs and approximately 370 children taking cross-sex hormones. There were also 33 biological girls who had mastectomies – including some as young as 15 – and two 17-year-old girls who had their uteruses and ovaries removed.

I found this concerning since the Oregon Department of Justice had declared in a February legal filing that “genital surgery is not performed on transgender minors”. Yet the state’s own data confirmed that children really do undergo genital surgery that leaves them permanently sterilized. I publicized my findings late last year.

In February, I contacted the Oregon Health Authority to express interest in a new research project. At first, they offered me 10 years’ worth of data – 2011 through 2020. This would have been invaluable in tracking the recent rise in gender dysphoria diagnoses, the age and other medical conditions of patients who pursue a gender transition, and the types of treatment they received.

Yet when I told officials that I wanted to study “gender-affirming treatment” over that decade, their reaction quickly shifted. From internal emails that I obtained under Oregon’s public records laws, my routine request was immediately flagged for review by senior executives. They were deeply concerned about the political “risks” of providing me with this data.

The first idea they debated was requiring me to sign a new contract that would prohibit me from publishing detailed results of my analysis. Then, they considered just purging all records related to gender dysphoria. They concluded that they didn’t have the legal authority to do that. They ultimately settled on another concerning – and telling – approach. The Oregon Health Authority told me that the state database was out of compliance with federal privacy laws. Therefore, it couldn’t be released to me or anyone else.

This claim falls flat on so many levels. Oregon has been selling this database to dozens of organizations for 15 years. Customers have included academic researchers, journalists, and even computer companies seeking data to train artificial intelligence tools. If this database were illegal, someone would have flagged it by now – not least the state’s lawyers.

More to the point: If Oregon really believed that the database was out of compliance with federal laws, the state would be required to notify the Secretary of Health and Human Services. It would also be required to inform the news media and each and every one of the millions of individuals affected. Yet the state has made no such move. The Oregon Health Authority hasn’t even notified those of us who already possess the data, nor have they tried to recall it. If their lawyers really say they’re not in compliance, those same lawyers would tell them to begin the notifications immediately.

I’m left with one undeniable conclusion: Oregon is withholding the data to prevent me from researching – and telling the public – about the prevalence and practice of gender medicine in my state. That is a severe violation of my constitutional rights under the First Amendment, and in August, I filed a federal lawsuit to vindicate my rights.

I’m appalled to see this kind of authoritarian behavior from my own Democrat-led state government. My fellow liberals wouldn’t tolerate this from a Republican administration, and I refuse to tolerate it from my own.

Paul Terdal is an advocate for health consumer rights and a visiting fellow at Do No Harm.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 18:40

"He Was A Savant": How Charlie Kirk Challenged And Inspired A Generation Of Rising Political Influencers

Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

By the time he set off on his final campus speaking tour, Charlie Kirk had built an organization of some 250,000 members, all the while engaging in conservative political organizing, engineering get-out-the-vote efforts, drawing tens of millions of dollars in funding, and growing a media influence machine.

Charlie Kirk, founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, speaks at the High School Leadership Summit, a Turning Point USA event, at George Washington University in Washington on July 26, 2018. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

A driving force behind Kirk’s movement, Turning Point USA, has been his focus on engaging young minds in political debate and setting an example for new generations of political influencers like himself.

Through this mission, Kirk often found himself on a college campus, delivering a speech or sitting down with a table and a microphone and defying his critics with the prompt “prove me wrong,” even in the face of insults and threats.

He continued this mission until the very end.

“Charlie Kirk could’ve been running his multi-million dollar operation from a fancy suite or a fancy office, and he could’ve just hired the dangerous part of what he did out to other activists, and instead of doing that, he always stayed in the trenches. And I think that’s one of the most admirable things about him,” said Gunnar Thorderson, a former Turning Point USA organizer who helped establish the organization’s presence at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, where Kirk was assassinated on Sept. 10.

Thorderson rose from the Turning Point USA chapter president at UVU to a state-level director for the organization in Utah. Now, Thorderson is a sitting member of the Utah Republican State Central Committee. He attributes his trajectory, in large part, to Kirk’s personal mentorship.

“I really got to view him as a mentor and as a personal friend, as he would invest in me one-on-one, on many occasions,” he told The Epoch Times.

Thorderson is among many whose political voices Kirk amplified since co-founding Turning Point USA in 2012.

“I owe my entire political career to Charlie Kirk,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said in an X post the day after Kirk’s death.

“I would quite literally not be in office today if it weren’t for him. Even when my own party was working against me, Charlie endorsed me and campaigned to help me win election.”

Luna’s communications director, David Leatherwood, also came into his own, politically, through Turning Point USA and Kirk’s personal support.

Leatherwood, 37, a self-described gay conservative, first met Kirk in 2017.

“I met Charlie at one of his campus tours in Fort Lauderdale, and we actually filmed a video together where he said that he, you know, supports the gay community, and that e pluribus unum, represents all Americans,” Leatherwood told The Epoch Times.

“And ever since that day, he was always supportive of me, and he invited me to be an ambassador for his organization.”

Raising Young Conservative Voices

Hallie S., 26, from Gainesville, Florida, credits Kirk’s organization with helping her and other conservative students at Santa Fe College be more outspoken with their views.

“I’ve always been more conservative. I was raised conservative, but was never big about speaking up, especially in Gainesville, which is such a liberal area, and you never know how people are going to react,” she said.

Charlie Kirk, founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, speaks at the High School Leadership Summit, a Turning Point USA event, at George Washington University in Washington on July 26, 2018. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Hallie said she was able to revamp the College Republicans chapter at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, thanks in large part to the influence of Kirk and Turning Point USA.

“Charlie Kirk was a huge portion of that. He had a huge impact on politics on college campuses, especially in Santa Fe,” she told The Epoch Times.

“You had all these students that were like, ‘wow, my conservative values are being represented in a way that really had never been represented before.’”

Kelly Shackelford, a First Amendment attorney and president and CEO of First Liberty Institute, said he invited Kirk to speak at a fundraising event in Houston, Texas, shortly after discovering the young influencer.

“Typically at fundraisers, everybody’s 60-and-older,” Shackelford told the Epoch Times.

“And so I wanted to encourage these older people that there are younger people who are coming behind them, and it’s not going to die with them.”

Making an Online Presence

With much of his content shared online, Kirk’s influence spread beyond the numerous college campuses he visited over the years and reached millions online.

Tucker, a teenager who requested his surname not be revealed due to fear of retaliation, told The Epoch Times that Kirk was among a limited number of political influencers whose content he liked to engage with.

“I don’t really like watching political stuff. I mean, it'll come up like on TikTok or something like that, and I just scroll past it,” Tucker said.

“But when I saw his stuff, I would always click on it cause it was always interesting and he was just somebody that you could look up to.”

During an interview on California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s podcast in March, the Democratic governor confessed that his 13-year-old son wanted to skip school for a chance to meet Kirk.

Gunnar Thorderson and Charlie Kirk share a photo together backstage, during an October 2020 event. Courtesy of Gunnar Thorderson

“Literally last night, trying to put my son to bed, he’s like, ‘Dad I just—what time, what time is Charlie gonna be here? What time?’” Newsom said.

“And I’m like, ‘dude, you’re in school tomorrow.’”

Leatherwood said he was comforted knowing how many moments of Kirk’s life were captured on camera, preserving his thoughts and views.

“The beautiful thing about today and modern technology and our access, our access to media, is that, you know, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of footage of him speaking. And those will live on, and I think they'll actually memorialize his legacy in an even greater way than people can anticipate,” he said.

Driving Debate

Kirk made debate a core component of his mission. As he visited college campuses around the country, he often did so with a pop-up tent emblazoned with the words “prove me wrong,” and he offered up a microphone to those with differing points of view to confront him directly through dialogue.

“He went from campus to campus, engaging with students that he didn’t really view as the enemy ever. It was just that he felt they needed to be educated and that they needed to have proper discourse,” Thorderson said.

“And it was through that that they would end up being convinced of our ideas.”

Not all of Kirk’s interlocutors were swayed by his arguments, but they credited him for allowing a discussion.

Charlie Kirk and Cenk Uygur speak together on day three of the America (AM) Fest hosted by Turning Point USA in Phoenix, Ariz., on Dec. 21, 2024. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

“I stand by so little of everything that [Kirk] said, but one of the things he stood by was conversation,” Hunter Kozak said in a video post the day after Kirk’s death.

Kozak, 29, is a student at UVU and was the last person to debate with Kirk before he was shot.

Kirk was just minutes into what was meant to be the first stop of his latest campus speaking tour when he was assassinated.

Dean Withers, who had debated Kirk, broke down in tears while filming a livestream on Sept. 10, as he learned Kirk had been shot. Addressing his initial reaction, Withers filmed another video that evening, acknowledging his disagreements with Kirk.

“Does that mean I think he deserved to lose his life? No. Does that mean I think his two young children, who were in attendance at the event where he was shot, deserved to watch their father die? No. Does that mean I think they deserve to grow up without him? No. Does that mean I think that his wife, who was also there, deserved to lose her husband? No,” Withers said.

“And honestly, if you answered yes to any of those questions, there’s a very clear line drawn between me and you. I don’t want your support, and I don’t support you either.”

Living Beyond Politics

Throughout his stardom as a conservative political influencer, Kirk frequently looked beyond politics and emphasized his Christian faith.

Speaking with The Epoch Times, Thorderson recalled a morning when he and Kirk were traveling for an event and went for a workout in the hotel gym. It wasn’t long before their exercise turned philosophical.

“I remember at the time, I was struggling with my own faith and kind of just playing devil’s advocate with him,” Thorderson recalled.

“And he was just so steadfast in his faith and impressive with his knowledge. And that was a moment where I didn’t feel like he was necessarily preaching to me, but really just trying to connect on a personal level and trying to see me where I was at.”

Students and other supporters holding a vigil to honor the memory of Charlie Kirk sing "Amazing Grace" at the University of Florida in Gainesville, on Sept. 11, 2025. Courtesy of Natasha Holt

At other points, Thorderson described Kirk being able to hold a knowledgeable conversation on matters beyond politics and articulate a connection back to his core values.

“He was a savant,” Thorderson said.

Thorderson also recalled having the chance to know Kirk when the Turning Point USA leader was getting to know his wife, Erika.

“He just always valued family and wanted to start a family. And that was just, even before he had kids, that was a core value for him,” Thorderson said.

Kirk leaves behind his wife Erika and two children.

John Haughey, Savannah Pointer, Nanette Holt, and Natasha Holt contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 17:30

National Guard Deployment Planned For Memphis, Says Trump

Authored by Savannah Hulsey Pointer via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President Donald Trump announced that the National Guard would be heading to Memphis to deal with crime.

Armed National Guard members patrol the National Mall in Washington on Aug. 27, 2025. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

The president made his comments on Sept. 12 during an interview with Fox News, saying that the administration would take on crime in the Tennessee city, and possibly others, such as New Orleans.

During his comments, Trump said that Memphis is “deeply troubled,” and added that the national guard presence would fix the problem, “just like we did in Washington.”

The president also said he sees New Orleans as a city in “really bad shape,” and that Gov. Jeff Landry wants him to act.

“The governor wants us to go in. We'll do that too,” Trump said.

The announcement comes just over a month after the Aug. 11 federalization of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington.

As of Sept. 10, more than 2,300 arrests have been made by federal and local partners in Washington, and more than 220 illegal firearms have been seized, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Trump previously said Chicago could be the next major city to face a federal crime crackdown.

He said the National Guard could “solve Chicago within one week.”

“After we do this, we’ll go to another location, and we’ll make it safe also,” Trump told reporters at the time inside the Oval Office, referring to his efforts in Washington to crack down on crime.

“Chicago’s a mess. We’ll straighten that one out probably next. That will be our next one after this. And it won’t even be tough.”

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 16:20

Narcan Weaponized: Homeless San Francisco Residents Turning Lifesaver Into Tool of Harm

Narcan, the overdose-reversal drug hailed as a lifesaver, is now being weaponized against San Francisco’s drug users, , according to ABC 7.

The San Francisco Standard, in a report shared by ABC7 News, details how some residents frustrated with open drug use are allegedly using Narcan not to save lives, but to inflict harm.

"A couple of instances I heard was someone was sleeping in U.N. Plaza and they basically felt somebody putting this plastic nozzle up their nose and then they woke up to crazy withdrawals and the person was telling them that they couldn't sleep in the plaza," said SF Standard reporter David Sjoestedt. "And, the allegation is that this wasn't somebody who thought they were overdosing, it was somebody who wanted them to move."

Sjoestedt explained that Narcan can trigger immediate and severe withdrawal symptoms: “a lot of pain, anxiety, throwing up, and wild temperature fluctuations.” A UCSF health expert told the SF Standard that misusing the drug in this way should be considered assault.

ABC writes that the city’s Department of Public Health reaffirmed Narcan’s intended use: it should only be administered if someone appears to be overdosing. Using it to deliberately cause suffering, the department stressed, is “inhumane.”

And of course, the disturbing misuse of Narcan in San Francisco underscores a broader failure of the city’s liberal policies, which have poured resources into harm reduction without addressing the root causes of addiction, homelessness, and public safety. Instead of creating real solutions, officials have enabled an environment where even life-saving tools are twisted into instruments of cruelty—leaving both residents and vulnerable addicts caught in the chaos of a city unraveling.

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Looking for some quick ideas before tonight's 11PM EST deadline? 

Steak Lover's Bundle - the steaks, the whole steaks, and nothing but the steaks (top seller)

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Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 15:45

Office Depot Fires Worker Who Refused To Print Charlie Kirk Vigil Poster

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

Office Depot has fired an employee at its Portage, Michigan, store after the worker refused to print a poster for a vigil honoring conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated this week while speaking at Utah Valley University.

The company announced the dismissal in a statement on Sept. 13, expressing regret over what it called “unacceptable and insensitive” conduct that violated company policy.

Office Depot said it had apologized to the customer, launched an internal review, and reinforced training to ensure “respect, integrity, and customer service are upheld at every location.”

The incident came to light in a video posted online by attorney and GOP activist Matthew DePerno, who said that the Kalamazoo County Republican Party ordered the poster, but when picking it up, an Office Depot staff member said they would not print it because it was “political propaganda.”

In the video, the employee—who identified as the manager on duty—said, “We don’t print political propaganda.” When pressed on what specifically made the poster political, the manager replied, “Because he’s a political figure and I don’t have to.”

Today at 2:24 PM, the Kalamazoo County Republican Party #KGOP placed an order for a poster of #CharlieKirk for a vigil tonight. At 5:30 "Beryl" the print supervisor (guy on left) called and said they are refusing to print the poster because it is "propaganda." Hey @officedepot… pic.twitter.com/pKHAQ2OQda

— Matthew S. DePerno, Esq. (@mdeperno) September 12, 2025

DePerno later said the group went to FedEx, where staff printed the poster free of charge.

Michigan Republicans reacted to the incident, with Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.) calling the refusal “shameful,” writing on X that the poster order was paid for and that the only reason that it was rejected was “because it was in memory of Charlie Kirk.”

Michigan Senate Minority Leader Aric Nesbitt, a Republican, also weighed in, praising Office Depot for firing the individual who refused to print the poster, which was intended for an event at Bronson Park in downtown Kalamazoo on Friday evening.

Assassination of Kirk

Kirk’s death has sparked memorials across the country, as well as an outpouring of condemnation of political violence.

Kirk, 31, was the founder of Turning Point USA and a prominent conservative voice on college campuses. He was shot in the neck while addressing a crowd at Utah Valley University in Orem on Sept. 10. A suspect, Tyler Robinson, has been arrested. Authorities have not publicly identified a motive in the attack.

The killing has prompted condemnation across the political spectrum and around the world. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) called it “an attack on the American experiment,” warning that violence aimed at silencing speech threatens the nation’s very identity.

“It is an attack on all of us,” Cox said at a Sept. 12 press conference. “It is an attack on our ideals.”

In Washington, a group of House Republicans is pressing congressional leaders to create a select committee to investigate what they describe as “a coordinated assault by the radical left on the rule of law.”

In a Sept. 11 letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and more than a dozen colleagues urged a probe into the “money, influence, and power” behind political violence.

“The patterns are undeniable: we are witnessing a sustained breakdown of law and order, fueled not by chance, but by anti-American ideology,” the lawmakers wrote.

They called for a committee with subpoena power to trace funding networks tied to nongovernmental organizations, donors, media outlets, and public officials.

*  *  *

Reminder: Reserve your order by tonight for Wednesday delivery

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 11:40

Nonstick Cookware On The Chopping Block In California

California lawmakers have advanced a bill to ban the sale of nonstick cookware and corded kitchen appliances that contain PFAS (forever chemicals) despite strong opposition from an industry group that insists the products are save.

Bill 682 would phase out a range of consumer products in the state - along with many commercial products, that contain any amount of "intentionally added PFAS" starting in 2028. 

PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are man-made chemicals, known as forever chemicals because they don't break down easily and can build up in the human body and the environment. 

The bill would make it illegal for anyone to distribute, sell or offer for sale any cookware that contained the chemicals - so all you garage sale sellers better watch out. 

"PFAS are leading to an avoidable public health crisis," said state Sen. Ben Allen (D) who introduced the bill. "It’s clear we need to be taking stronger steps to regulate and minimize the use of these forever chemicals."

PFAS are leading to an avoidable public health crisis. It’s clear we need to be taking stronger steps to regulate and minimize the use of these forever chemicals.https://t.co/GpJPxTcxF8

— Ben Allen (@BenAllenCA) September 11, 2025

According to Allen, forever chemicals are affecting California communities and the environment. As the Epoch Times notes further, the Breast Cancer Prevention Partners, the California Association of Sanitation Agencies, Clean Water Action, the Environmental Working Group, and the Natural Resources Defense Council are in support of the measure.

“PFAS are a class of approximately 14,000 man-made chemicals,” the groups said in a statement to the Legislature.

“Health concerns linked with these chemicals include cancers, decreased fertility, hormone disruption, liver disease, developmental harm, and immune system suppression, including interference with the efficacy of vaccines.”

California has already banned unnecessary PFAS use in many products, including certain cosmetics and personal care products, some textiles and clothing, fire-fighting foam, certain children’s products, paper-based food-packaging, cosmetics, and more.

The bill would prohibit the distribution or sale of any cleaning products, cookware, dental floss, juvenile products, food packaging, and ski wax starting Jan. 1, 2028.

On Jan. 1, 2040, the bill would ban the sale of certain commercial or industrial products that contain intentionally added PFAS.

The banned items would include certain textile products, refrigerants, solvents, propellants, automotive products, lubricants, and other industry-specific products, including those for semiconductor manufacturing and petroleum production, unless the state finds the use of the chemicals in the product is unavoidable.

The Cookware Sustainability Alliance, an industry group formed by major cookware companies, urged lawmakers to oppose the bill.

“The proposal risks taking safe, affordable, and reliable kitchen essentials off the shelves, leaving customers with fewer options for the products they use every day,” the group said in a statement.

The alliance says PFAS is a category that includes some chemicals—such as fluoropolymers used to coat nonstick cookware—that have been deemed safe for uses in food preparation by the Food and Drug Administration and the European Food Safety Authority.

“They are non-toxic and inert, they do not bioaccumulate, and importantly, they are not water soluble,” the alliance stated.

“In fact, fluoropolymer coatings are used on medical implantation devices such as pacemakers and catheters.”

The organization says the ban on PFAS would strip Californians of choice, raise costs for households and businesses, create landfill waste, and threaten jobs and the economy.

“SB 682 would upend California kitchens overnight,” Steve Burns, the alliance president, said.

“Lawmakers could ban safe, heavily regulated products that millions of families and restaurants use every day—driving up prices, killing jobs, and sending tons of cookware to landfills.”

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 11:05

 

Is there anything more delightful than cruising on a cool evening, top down, big sky overhead, illumination courtesy of thousands of stars, who anticipating your late-night cruise tens of millions of years ago, sent their light your way?

This 280SL is the perfect car for such a ride; I love seeing one of my favorite classic convertibles in one of my favorite color combos, Midnight Blue over Parchment White. (I had a Red/Tan 1986 560 SL for 17 years; sold it for exactly what I paid for it).

Recently sold on BAT, she appears to have undergone a money-is-no-object restoration. The car was disassembled and repainted under previous ownership and repainted a second time recently; the 2.8-liter M130 inline-six was mated to a period-incorrect five-speed Tremec manual (MB offered 4-speed manuals as standard in 1969). The restoration included the repaint, an interior re-trim, and an overhaul of the suspension, brakes, steering, and AC.

The Midnight Blue exterior paired with a Parchment leather interior is a spectacular combination, one of my favorites. No wonder this baby went for $180,000 at Bring A Trailer.

But you don’t have to spend big bucks to enjoy open-air driving; go find a used Miata — skip the $4,000 versions with 200k miles — find yourself a well-sorted Miata for $10-15k with less than 40,000 on the odometer; $20k buys you under 20,000 miles — practically new! (And manual transmissions, too!). It’s the perfect starter car for anyone who wants to enjoy open-air driving on a beautiful day or night…

 

 

Source: Bring A Trailer

The post 1969 Mercedes-Benz 280 SL 5-Speed appeared first on The Big Picture.

Visualizing The Number Of Farms In Each US State

Today, the average farm in America stands at 466 acres, but there is wide variation across states.

In Rhode Island, the average size is 60 acres—but this jumps to 2,743 in Wyoming.

Not only does this highlight the dominance of big farms, but how state economies and different types of agricultural production influence the size and scale of farmland.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist's Dorothy Neufeld, shows farm counts by state, using data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Texas Has More Farms Than Any Other State

In the table below, we show the total number of farms in each state in 2024:

With 231,000 farms, Texas has more than double the second-highest state, Iowa.

Across Texas, 2.3 million people are directly employed in the agricultural industry, largely focused on cattle, hay, milk, and corn. Altogether, the industry drove almost $868 billion in economic output last year.

*  *  *

*  *  *

In Iowa, farmland covers 84% of the state’s land area—one of the highest nationally. On average, farms are 346 acres in size, with the state being the largest producer of corn and eggs nationally.

California, meanwhile, is home to 62,500 farms, with dairy production topping $8.6 billion in 2024—the state’s most valuable commodity last year. Additionally, California produces almost 75% of America’s fruits and nuts and over one-third of its vegetables.

On the other end of the spectrum, Rhode Island has just 1,000 farms given its small land area and high population density. Similarly, Alaska (1,200) and Delaware (2,150) each fall at the bottom of the rankings.

To learn more about this topic, check out this graphic on the share of farmland by state.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 09:55

'Strong Chance' US Will Form Strategic Bitcoin Reserve This Year: Alex Thorn

Authored by Ciaran Lyons via CoinTelegraph.com,

Galaxy Digital’s Alex Thorn says the market is "underpricing" the odds of a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve forming this year, though others are skeptical.

There is a high likelihood that the United States government will form the highly anticipated Strategic Bitcoin Reserve by the end of this year, says Galaxy Digital’s head of firmwide research, Alex Thorn.

However, other industry executives are less confident.

“I still think there’s a strong chance the US government will announce this year that it has formed the strategic Bitcoin reserve (SBR) and is formally holding BTC as a strategic asset,” Thorn said in an X post on Thursday.

“Market seems to be completely underpricing the likelihood of such an announcement,” Thorn added.

Several developments hint that the plan is moving forward

While US President Trump signed the executive order officially establishing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and US Digital Asset Stockpile in March, a formalized strategic plan has not been confirmed yet. 

Source: Alex Thorn

However, several recent developments suggest that the plan is still progressing.

On Tuesday, US lawmakers introduced a bill directing the US Treasury to examine and produce a report on the feasibility and technical considerations of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

Meanwhile, on July 31, Cointelegraph reported that Trump’s crypto liaison confirmed that the administration is still keen on a strategic Bitcoin reserve, despite only briefly mentioning it in its recently published crypto policy report.

Not all crypto market participants agree it will happen so soon, however. CoinRoutes’ former chairman, Dave Weisburger, said it is more likely to happen in 2026.

Some Bitcoiners fear that the US stalling could push them behind

Weisburger added that he has “made the point many times that this administration is too smart to announce ANYTHING until AFTER they accumulate to their initial target.”

Some prominent Bitcoin advocates worry that the US could fall behind if they delay accumulating Bitcoin any further.

Jan3 founder Samson Mow told Magazine in June that the US “has to start” acquiring Bitcoin this year, or risk other countries beating them to it. “The risk is that the US is front-run by Pakistan,” he said.

On Wednesday, Kyrgyzstan, a key emerging player in Central Asia’s crypto market, advanced a bill to establish a state cryptocurrency reserve.

Meanwhile, on Aug. 6, Indonesian Bitcoin advocate group, Bitcoin Indonesia, said they recently met with Indonesian officials to discuss how the strategy could drive economic growth in the country.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 09:20

Most analysts expect the FOMC the reduce the Fed Funds rate by 25bps at the meeting this week, to a target range of 4 to 4 1/4 percent.    Market participants currently expect the FOMC to also cut rates an additional 25bps at both the October and December meetings.
From BofA:

We expect the Fed to cut rates by 25bp to 4.0-4.25% at its September meeting. We look for two changes in the description of current conditions in the first paragraph of the FOMC statement. The reference to swings in net exports should be removed, though some version of the text saying “growth of economic activity moderated in the first half of the year” will probably stay. More importantly, the description of labor market conditions is likely to be downgraded. The FOMC might opt for language similar to last September: “Job gains have slowed, and the unemployment rate has moved up but remains low.”
...
The economic forecasts from the June SEP have aged remarkably well. Growth could get marked up by a tenth for this year, but the out years should stay roughly unchanged. We don’t see any need to tinker with the path of the unemployment rate, since it is on track to reach the Fed’s 4Q projection of 4.5%.
emphasis added

Projections will be released at this meeting. For review, here are the June projections.  
Since the last projections were released, economic growth, the unemployment rate and inflation all have been close to expectations.
The BEA's estimate for first half 2025 GDP showed real growth at 1.4% annualized. Most estimates for Q3 GDP are around 1.7%.  That would put the real growth for the first three quarters at 1.5% annualized - at the top of end of the June projections.  It is possible the FOMC will revise up Q4 2025 GDP growth slightly.
GDP projections of Federal Reserve Governors and Reserve Bank presidents, Change in Real GDP1 Projection Date202520262027 Jun 20251.2 to 1.51.5 to 1.81.7 to 2.0Mar 20251.5 to 1.91.6 to 1.91.6 to 2.0 1 Projections of change in real GDP and inflation are from the fourth quarter of the previous year to the fourth quarter of the year indicated.

The unemployment rate was at 4.3% in August.  The unemployment rate will likely increase further this year, and it is possible the FOMC will revise up the Q4 2025 unemployment rate slightly.
Unemployment projections of Federal Reserve Governors and Reserve Bank presidents, Unemployment Rate2 Projection Date202520262027 Jun 20254.4 to 4.54.3 to 4.64.2 to 4.6Mar 20254.3 to 4.44.2 to 4.54.1 to 4.4 2 Projections for the unemployment rate are for the average civilian unemployment rate in the fourth quarter of the year indicated.

As of July 2025, PCE inflation increased 2.6% year-over-year (YoY), unchanged from 2.6% YoY in June. There will likely be some further increases in the 2nd half of 2025, but the forecast range is probably reasonable.
Inflation projections of Federal Reserve Governors and Reserve Bank presidents, PCE Inflation1 Projection Date202520262027 Jun 20252.8 to 3.22.3 to 2.62.0 to 2.2Mar 20252.6 to 2.92.1 to 2.32.0 to 2.1
PCE core inflation increased 2.9% YoY in July, up from 2.8% YoY in June.  There will likely be further increase in core PCE inflation, but the projections will likely remain mostly the same.
Core Inflation projections of Federal Reserve Governors and Reserve Bank presidents, Core Inflation1 Projection Date202520262027 Jun 20252.9 to 3.42.3 to 2.72.0 to 2.2Mar 20252.7 to 3.02.1 to 2.42.0 to 2.1

Russia Gains Another Village In Central Ukraine Oblast As Negotiations Effectively Dead

On Saturday Russia's military announced it has captured another village in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, which neighbors Donetsk, and signifies that Moscow is taking the fight beyond the Donbass - at least slowly.

The village of Novomykolaivka has been taken, the military says, after Russian troops have been operating in Dnipropetrovsk since early July. However, the Ukrainian military-linked mapping platform DeepState has contradicted these claims, saying the village still remains under Ukraine's control.

via AFP

Russian forces are widely estimated to already control some 20% of total Ukraine territory, and maintain clear advantage in terms of manpower, equipment, and artillery ammo.

Ukrainian forces have endured incremental losses, and yet President Zelensky is still refusing to even contemplate territorial compromise for the sake of achieving peace.

While Trump has said his patience is running out, both warring sides have in recent days acknowledged that the negotiations process is effectively dead:

Speaking at a conference in Kyiv, Zelensky told the West not to trust Putin and said his maximalist ambitions had not changed.

"Putin's goal is to occupy all of Ukraine. And no matter what he tells anyone, it is clear that he has set the war machine in motion to such an extent that he simply cannot stop it unless he is forced to fundamentally change his personal goals," Zelensky said.

The Kremlin for its part has described a "pause" in negotiation efforts, after the delegations met twice this year as part of Trump-mediated efforts.

Moscow has further blamed Kiev's European backers for essentially seeking to sabotage peace efforts. They are encouraging Zelensky to stick to Ukraine's own maximalist demands, while promising a seemingly endless supply of military hardware and funds to keep fighting.

Google maps

Kiev sees Russian forces' push into Dnipropetrovsk as evidence that Putin intends to keep going, deeper into Ukraine, and possibly eventually threatening other major cities not previously under attack.

Yet, there's no evidence that Putin desires to conquer all of Ukraine, and the Kremlin would likely balk at the nightmarish prospect of trying to keep such a massive expanse of territory under permanent occupation.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 07:35

Germany's Bureaucratic State Devours 3% Of GDP

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe

The bureaucratic jungle in Germany is expanding unchecked. According to Germany’s Federal Statistical Office, the number of information obligations for businesses has reached a new record high this year.

In private life, state bureaucracy is omnipresent. Whether it’s filing taxes or navigating the paperwork faced by homeowners, the state routinely enlists its citizens to carry out its own administrative work. In essence, the citizen performs a protracted year of social service in administration—without compensation, always under the looming threat of legal coercion.

Kafkaesque Bureaucracy

In the economy, public administration has taken on Kafkaesque traits. No longer does one need to wander endless, dimly lit corridors to survive an administrative marathon. Modern bureaucracy now comes in digital form—yet remains invasive in character, working hand in hand with politics to continuously carve out new areas of control.

The costs of this system can be calculated quite precisely in terms of the hours businesses are forced to dedicate to compliance.

According to recent data from the Federal Statistical Office, the coerced “service contribution” of businesses to Germany’s administration now amounts to €64.2 billion annually. This includes reporting and disclosure obligations, documentation, and compliance requirements—ranging from environmental reports and employee timesheets to machine safety protocols and mandatory filings with trade associations. Bureaucracy overwhelms the actual work of companies to a grossly disproportionate extent.

The statisticians in Wiesbaden provided specifics: as of June 30, 2025, German companies faced 12,427 distinct reporting and documentation requirements, depending on size and sector. In just the first half of 2025, another 37 obligations were added. Since 2018, nearly a thousand new rules have been tacked on.

BSW as an Initiator

Remarkably, it is the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW)—a party with a clear socialist imprint—that has criticized the overburdening of small and medium-sized businesses by compulsory administrative demands. Ironically, it is the welfare state—this fundamentally socialist redistribution machine—that has driven much of the bureaucracy’s expansion.

Entrepreneurs, freelancers, and the self-employed have virtually no meaningful political advocates. Despite a prolonged economic slump and obvious overregulation, Germany remains trapped in a statist mindset that indirectly fuels bureaucracy. Businesses are harnessed like a reserve army, dragged behind the cart of regulation, while the bureaucracy sustains itself by expanding its reach and budgets.

In Germany—and broadly across the European Union—this expansion meets little political resistance. On the contrary, it has fused with politics into a single power structure.

Programs such as the “green transformation” generate mountains of documentation requirements, dumped onto businesses until filing cabinets burst. It borders on the grotesque that an ideology divorced from economic reality converts nearly 2% of GDP into bureaucratic burdens—simply to force social and political visions into the economic process.

The Evergreen of "Bureaucracy Reduction"

Bureaucracy precisely defines the relationship between state and citizen. And here, we are stuck in a dead end.

“Bureaucracy reduction” is one of those perennial political catchphrases used during election campaigns to distract from the core problem. Politicians across the party system—who long ago turned the administrative state into an extension of their own power—project an image of activism and responsiveness, all while ensuring that no real reform ever occurs.

It is absurd to assume, against the backdrop of a worsening labor market, that politicians would actually cut back the public sector. Today, 5.5 million people are employed in Germany’s civil service—420,000 more than before the COVID lockdowns. Bureaucracy also functions as a political job buffer, insulating against a looming employment crisis. Ironically, this expansion exacerbates the very crisis it seeks to cover up. The result: Germany’s economy has recorded no productivity growth for years.

A Turnaround in the U.S.

Meanwhile, in the United States, President Donald Trump has managed a turnaround. On the federal level, about 100,000 government jobs have been cut—a clear success for a policy based on deregulation and free markets. A similar achievement can be seen in Argentina under President Javier Milei, who triggered an economic boom through deregulation and the unleashing of market forces.

The numbers from the Federal Statistical Office reflect this political trend, though they capture only direct costs from administrative compliance. The so-called opportunity costs—foregone profits, lost investments, and missed market opportunities—remain outside the ledger. Last year, Germany’s ifo Institute estimated these indirect costs at another €80 billion. With core administrative burdens pegged around €66 billion, there is consensus on the scale.

All told, Germany faces about €146 billion in direct and indirect bureaucracy costs. In effect, the state burns through roughly 3% of GDP—evidence of profound political and administrative mismanagement. Above all, it is Brussels that keeps pressuring national lawmakers with ever-deeper regulatory regimes, forcing further layers of domestic bureaucracy.

Debt and More Debt

The ballooning costs of bureaucracy run parallel to Germany’s rising national debt, projected to climb from 63% of GDP to 95% in the coming years—assuming Berlin can even place such massive debt programs in the bond markets.

Germany’s economy has lost its international competitive edge, driven by political ideology translated directly into regulatory costs. Layered on top of this dirigisme is a self-inflicted energy crisis, together crippling the German industrial base.

The decline of the German economy is the inevitable outcome of decades spent reviving socialist ideas—in this case, eco-dirigiste fundamental control over key sectors such as energy and mobility. That this experiment would fail should have been obvious to anyone familiar with the historical record of centrally planned systems. Yet for many Germans, this failure still feels like a new discovery.

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About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a German graduate economist, worked as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/14/2025 - 07:00