Authored by Maryanne Demasi via The Brownstone Institute,

For months, a quiet battle has been unfolding inside the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

It began with an analysis of child deaths after Covid vaccination, followed by strategic leaks to major media outlets, and has now erupted into the open with a memo from the regulator’s own vaccine chief.

In September, it was reported that FDA officials had privately investigated 25 paediatric deaths following Covid vaccination — the first systematic review of such cases since the rollout began.

The findings were meant to be presented to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). But the presentation never came. The meeting passed without a word. Something had happened behind closed doors.

Now we know what.

On 13 November 2025, STAT published an extraordinary insider account describing a tense internal meeting in which FDA scientist Dr Tracy Beth Høeg presented evidence of young people who had died after Covid vaccination.

According to STAT, her findings triggered pushback from career FDA regulators who feared the implications of acknowledging fatal cases.

Now, comes the explosive memo from FDA vaccine chief Dr Vinay Prasad, confirming — for the first time — that US regulators have formally attributed at least 10 of these children’s deaths to Covid vaccination.

Prasad called it “a profound revelation” with far-reaching implications for American vaccine policy, adding that the true number is “certainly an underestimate.”

Here, I’ll take you through the memo, the leaks, the internal rebellion at FDA, and what this means — not just for Covid vaccines, but for all vaccine approvals going forward.

This story marks a turning point in US vaccine regulation.

The Story That Divided the Regulator

In early September, insiders at the FDA and CDC quietly told the New York Times and the Washington Post that the agency had begun investigating child deaths reported to VAERS.

My reporting confirmed that Dr Tracy Beth Høeg, a senior adviser within the FDA’s vaccine division, had led the review — contacting families, gathering medical records, and obtaining autopsy findings.

click image for story

It was the first case-by-case evaluation of paediatric deaths conducted since the vaccines were authorised.

The review identified twenty-five children whose deaths occurred following vaccination. Those findings were expected to be presented to ACIP on 18–19 September. Instead, without explanation, the discussion disappeared from the agenda.

Even FDA Commissioner Dr Marty Makary had hinted at the findings on CNN, saying, “We’ve been looking into the VAERS database self-reports, [and] there have been children that have died from the Covid vaccine.”

He described an “intense” investigation involving doctors, autopsies, and family interviews. Yet ACIP heard nothing.

Had the FDA reversed course — or had internal forces blocked disclosure?

STAT’s reporting offered the first real clues.

Inside the FDA: The Meeting That Changed Everything

STAT described a confidential gathering of FDA vaccine scientists in which Høeg presented slides listing roughly two dozen deaths of young people following vaccination.

One slide reportedly read: “Timing fits. Diagnosis fits. No better explanation found. Sufficient information provided.”

According to STAT, some career regulators reacted with “quiet horror” — not at the deaths themselves, but at the policy implications of acknowledging them.

The article portrayed Høeg as pushing to bring the findings to ACIP and to amend vaccine labels for younger males, while longtime staff resisted, describing the evidence as “thin” and worrying about restricting vaccine access.

STAT reported that “no career regulator would stand by the decision,” and Høeg backed away from presenting the cases to ACIP.

It was a rare glimpse of a regulator divided against itself: career staff trying to contain the findings, and FDA leadership apparently trying to surface them.

Nothing more was said publicly — until Prasad’s memo detonated inside the agency.

Prasad’s Explosive Memo

The memo from Dr Vinay Prasad, Director of the FDA’s Centre for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), is unlike anything ever issued by a senior US vaccine regulator.

Addressed to all CBER staff, it confirmed what STAT only implied: FDA scientists had determined that “at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving Covid-19 vaccination.”

Prasad wrote that the true number is “certainly an underestimate” and that “the real number is higher.”

He wrote that “deaths were reported between 2021 and 2024, and ignored for years,” calling it a systemic failure that “requires humility and introspection.”

“It is horrifying to consider that the US vaccine regulation, including our actions, may have harmed more children than we saved,” he wrote.

Prasad defended Høeg’s analysis, saying “Dr Hoeg was correct in her assessment,” and that disagreements reflected subjective coding — not differing facts.

He also noted that healthy children at extremely low risk from Covid had been “coerced” into vaccination under Biden-era mandates, some of which he said “were harmful.”

He added that it was “difficult to read cases where kids aged 7 to 16 may be dead as a result of covid vaccines.”

Prasad also challenged one of the most repeated claims in pandemic messaging — that Covid infection causes more myocarditis than vaccination.

He argued that these comparisons rely on faulty denominators, because they count only people sick enough to seek hospital care while ignoring the far larger number of infections that never present to clinics.

He underscored that vaccination does not prevent eventual infection, so the comparison cannot be framed as “virus versus vaccine.”

A vaccinated child still encounters the virus over their lifetime — but now carries the additional myocarditis risk from the vaccine itself.

The Leaks

Prasad’s memo contained another revelation — confirmation of internal sabotage inside the FDA.

He wrote that “slides she presented, emails she sent, and distorted firsthand reports” from Høeg’s meeting had been leaked to media outlets by staff who believed they were acting appropriately.

He condemned the behaviour as “unethical, illegal, and…factually incorrect,” a blunt repudiation of how the STAT narrative had framed events.

In Prasad’s telling, Høeg had not exaggerated the evidence at all. She had uncovered what the FDA had failed to recognise for nearly three years — that Covid vaccines had killed children.

Far from being the rogue figure depicted in selective leaks, she was doing precisely what the public assumes a regulator does: investigating deaths, contacting families, gathering records, and treating each case as a potential signal that demands scrutiny.

For Prasad, the leaks weren’t merely improper — they betrayed the core obligation of a scientific agency.

He said internal debates must remain inside the FDA until ready for public release, and that he would not “endorse selective reporting of our meetings and documents.” Anyone unwilling to follow that principle, he said, should resign.

It was an extraordinary directive — and a clear sign that the internal battle over whether to acknowledge children’s deaths had reached a breaking point.

A Reaction from Inside ACIP

When the memo surfaced, ACIP vice-chair Dr Robert Malone issued his own statement.

He wrote that he had been aware of the review through ACIP’s internal working group, and that the child deaths “have been known since this summer but not released to the public due to the need to validate the initial findings independently.”

Bound by confidentiality, he could only say, “I have seen the data and findings, and they are even more stunning than this strongly worded letter indicates.”

He said he was “stunned, gobsmacked,” adding: “The significance and importance of this letter in the context of US and global vaccine policy cannot be overestimated. This is a revolution, the likes of which I never expected to see in my lifetime.”

Malone then took aim at the Covid-19 mRNA products: “These products do not work. They do not prevent disease and death. And as Secretary Kennedy testified in the Senate, objective analysis cannot even demonstrate that, on balance, they saved lives.”

MIT professor Retsef Levi — who leads ACIP’s Covid-19 Vaccines Workgroup — issued a similarly forceful response.

He wrote, “the acknowledgement that at least 10 children died from COVID vaccination must be followed with disclosure to the parents,” and said regulators and media “have gaslighted the vaccine injured, including the parents who lost their precious child.”

He described disclosure as “a moral imperative” and essential for any hope of trustworthy vaccine programs.

Inside ACIP, the memo is being understood not only as a scientific shift — but an ethical reckoning.

Critics Rise Up

Predictably, the memo triggered pushback from establishment figures who have spent years defending the Covid vaccines from scrutiny.

Dr Paul Offit — a long-time industry-aligned vaccine promoter and a familiar voice deployed whenever safety concerns arise — dismissed the memo as “science by press-release.”

He argued that the memo lacked context and should not be treated as evidence, calling the memo “irresponsible” and “dangerous.”

But Prasad’s communication was never presented as a scientific publication. It was an internal memo to staff. Offit’s attempt to judge it by academic-paper standards is a tactic to avoid addressing what the memo actually says — that children died and regulators overlooked it.

Former CBER director Dr Peter Marks — whose tenure is explicitly criticised in the memo for failing to identify child deaths for years — said he was “taken aback by the clearly political tone of the communication.”

But Prasad’s memo details precisely why Marks’s era is under scrutiny, including his 2021 decision to push out senior FDA officials Marion Gruber and Philip Krause after they objected to the Biden administration’s rush toward booster approval.

If anything was political, it was that episode.

For years, figures like Offit and Marks insisted that VAERS was a robust early-warning system — and that anyone citing it without follow-up investigation “didn’t understand pharmacovigilance.”

Now that FDA investigators have actually done the follow-up — contacting families, obtaining medical records, and reviewing autopsies — these same voices suddenly claim VAERS can’t establish causality at all.

This is the core hypocrisy. You cannot praise VAERS as the backbone of vaccine safety, then declare its signals meaningless once they are properly investigated.

Critics also warned that stricter evidence requirements — such as randomised trials and rejection of surrogate endpoints — would “slow innovation” or “harm vaccine confidence.”

But vaccine confidence is already shattered. Fewer than 10% of American healthcare workers took last season’s Covid booster.

Trust collapsed not because regulators asked too many questions — but because they asked too few, dismissed safety concerns that later proved real, and insisted on messaging long after the data had shifted.

The problem for these critics is not that children have died after vaccination. The problem is that the regulators have finally acknowledged it.

The Future of Vaccine Regulation in the United States

Prasad’s memo goes far beyond confirming child deaths. It announces a structural overhaul of vaccine oversight.

He wrote that future vaccine approvals would require randomised trials for most new products; that immunogenicity studies would no longer be accepted as proof of effectiveness in new populations; and that vaccines for pregnant women would not be authorised on unproven surrogate markers.

He committed to rewriting the US influenza vaccine framework and overhauling assessments of concomitant vaccination.

Most strikingly, he declared that vaccines would be treated as “no better or worse” than any other medical product — ending decades of special regulatory leniency.

“Never again,” he wrote, “will the US FDA commissioner have to himself find deaths in children for staff to identify it.”

A Global Shift Begins

The ACIP meeting on 4–5 December will be the first held under these new realities — with the knowledge that the FDA has attributed paediatric deaths to Covid vaccination, that senior leadership has repudiated the previous regulatory approach, and that a revolution in evidentiary standards is underway.

Because many international regulators track the FDA, the acknowledgment that children died from the Covid-19 vaccine — and that the agency failed to detect it — marks a seismic moment in global vaccine policy.

For bereaved families, the acknowledgment is devastating but necessary. For the public, it signals that the institutional silence of the pandemic era is beginning to fracture.

The reckoning has begun.

Republished from the author’s Substack

For years, Democrats and the mainstream media treated 2020 as settled history: the system worked, the election was secure, and accusations of fraud were conspiracy theories.

However, a newly declassified intelligence memo, paired with fresh whistleblower allegations, points in a less convenient direction. 

Behind the scenes, U.S. intelligence warned well before the 2020 election that core election systems were more exposed than the public was told, especially the vast digital repositories that hold voter registration data. Making matters worse, according to former senior cyber official Christopher Porter, intelligence leaders then kept those warnings from public view because airing them could have benefited President Donald Trump and complicated the push to portray Joe Biden’s eventual victory as unquestionable.

On January 15, 2020, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) produced an assessment warning that foreign adversaries could compromise U.S. election infrastructure in the coming presidential election, which has just been declassified. The memo specifically called out Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and other non-state actors. Analysts did not claim they had evidence of a specific plot to alter votes nationwide, but they did say the threat was real, technically plausible, and serious enough that senior intelligence officials personally briefed President Trump at the White House in February 2020. 

What worried analysts most was not some Hollywood-style rewrite of every ballot cast in America. “We assess that centralized election-related data repositories, such as voter registration databases, pollbooks, and official election websites, are most vulnerable to exploitation, and adversaries could use access to these systems to disrupt election processes,” the NIC assessment warned. 

Intelligence analysts believed vote tabulators and reporting systems had weaknesses, especially machines without paper backups. Despite this, they judged it would be hard for foreign adversaries to change the certified national outcome through direct machine compromise alone. That was never the same as saying the systems were secure in any ordinary sense. It meant large-scale outcome manipulation looked difficult, while localized disruption and perception management looked much easier. 

Despite the warnings of threats, after the election, senior officials pushed the opposite narrative, assuring Americans that 2020 had been a model of resilience.

In mid-November 2020, the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council’s executive committee issued the now-famous statement declaring that “the November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.” Chris Krebs, then running the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), later testified that he approved the statement and regarded it as the consensus view of the election-security community. That tidy line proved politically useful. It also sat awkwardly beside an internal intelligence record showing that multiple foreign actors had the capacity to exploit the very systems officials were publicly celebrating.

Porter, who prepared the January 2020 memo in his role overseeing cyber intelligence, says the contradiction was not an accident. “What is shocking is how uncontroversial some of these findings are to professionals—it is no secret that China and Iran compromise election equipment for a variety of intelligence purposes, nor was it controversial at the time that these systems had technical vulnerabilities,” he said. He goes further, alleging that bureaucratic and political considerations shaped what the public was allowed to know. “Every agency concurred on these findings, but because it was seen as potentially aiding the President’s reelection campaign, there was an active effort to damage him politically by refusing to share the declassified report with the public.”

Another way to put it was that the truth would have undermined faith in Joe Biden’s eventual victory. That is the heart of the whistleblower claim. 

According to Porter, Trump personally ordered the information declassified because he believed election integrity demanded it. But Porter said that CIA leadership refused to release it.

“The President of the United States personally ordered this information declassified and shared with the public because he thought election integrity was so important to our country. Despite this, CIA leaders at the time refused to release the declassified report,” he said. He also alleges the resistance did not end there. “Years later, when he was reelected, CIA went so far as to claim that the report had never been declassified. Even the record of its declassification had been removed from the system,” he said. Porter describes that as an extraordinary breach of normal intelligence practice, adding, “It is important for people to recognize that this is not normal behavior by the Intelligence Community—most officers would never do something like this.”

 Intelligence reports later concluded that China gained access to voter registration databases in multiple states before the election. A confidential FBI counterintelligence source also reported in summer 2020 that Beijing was attempting to interfere to aid Biden, including through a scheme involving fake U.S. driver’s licenses shipped into the country. Those reports did not become part of the public understanding in real time. Iranian hackers were not indicted until November 2021. Chinese penetration of voter data emerged publicly only after documents surfaced in March 2026. By then, the “most secure in history” line had already hardened into civic catechism.

The intelligence community’s inspector general, Christopher Fox, has opened a full investigation into whether Porter’s warnings were buried and whether he faced retaliation for pressing agencies to follow Trump’s declassification order. That review arrives alongside earlier findings from the intelligence community’s analytic ombudsman, who concluded in January 2021 that some analysts downplayed China’s role because of their disdain for Trump and reluctance to bolster his China policy.

None of this proves that foreign actors changed the 2020 outcome through hacked machines. But it tells us that senior officials knew election systems had meaningful vulnerabilities, but went out of their way to sell to the public a more politically convenient story.

Authored by Kay Rubacek via The Epoch Times,

You know this story.

Drop a frog into boiling water, and it will scramble out immediately. But place that same frog in cool water, heat it slowly, and degree by degree, it will never notice the danger until it is too late.

Most of us accept this without question.

The problem is that the story is not true.

It traces back to a German physiologist named Friedrich Goltz, who in 1869 conducted a series of experiments with a rather unusual purpose: to determine whether the soul resided in the brain or the spinal cord. He removed portions of a frog’s brain and observed what the animal could no longer do without it.

He found that a frog without its brain would sit placidly in slowly heating water and not attempt to escape. However, a normal frog, with its brain intact, would feel the rising temperature and get out.

That finding was passed around over the decades that followed, stripped of its context, and reshaped into the cautionary tale we now all repeat. 

later biologists confirmed the original finding: A frog in cold water will jump out before it gets too hot.

The frog that stays in hot water is the one that can no longer think for itself.

We have been repeating that story for more than 150 years as settled truth, because it felt right, without ever stopping to ask whether it was actually true.

We accepted a false warning about the danger of not noticing gradual change, without noticing that the warning itself was false.

That should give us pause on its own.

But this month, it became more than an interesting historical footnote when a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Oxford, MIT, and UCLA published a landmark study on how artificial intelligence (AI) is affecting human cognition.

The findings are fascinating, but the metaphor they chose caught many people’s attention.

They wrote of the boiling frog.

Scientists studying the effects of AI on the human mind described how the human cost of using AI could be “analogous to the ‘boiling frog’ effect, where each incremental act feels costless, until the cumulative effect becomes overwhelming to address.”

They were describing something that doesn’t arrive in a single dramatic moment, but degree by degree, use by use, in the ordinary decisions of ordinary days.

Whether knowingly or not, they used a story about an animal that only stops trying to escape once you remove its ability to think.

In their study, the researchers gave participants a series of mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension problems to solve. One group had access to an AI assistant throughout. The other worked alone. Then, without warning, the AI was removed, and everyone was tested independently on the same problems.

The AI group performed significantly worse.

That result, perhaps, is not surprising.

What is surprising is this: Every participant in the experiment had a skip button.

There was no penalty for using it, no reward for pushing through. The choice to try or to give up was entirely their own.

The AI group chose to skip at nearly double the rate.

This was not an inability to solve the problems.

It was an unwillingness to try. After just 10 minutes of having an AI system handle every moment of difficulty, something had changed in the participants’ choices. The researchers give a name to what was lost: “desirable difficulties.” It is a term from cognitive science that describes the productive struggle that, in the moment, creates a challenge and, over time, is the process by which human beings learn, grow, and develop capabilities.

The discomfort of not knowing, the resistance of a hard problem, the effort required to work through something without being handed the answer—these are not obstacles to learning. They are learning. And AI, which is designed to be maximally helpful in the immediate moment, removes them every single time.

The concerning part is not that AI makes people less capable in any permanent or measurable sense; it is that it makes people less willing to try. It erodes the willingness to push through a challenge—the very foundation on which intelligence is built and maintained. A person who never lifts anything heavy does not lose the biological capacity for strength overnight.

This is what the researchers meant when they invoked the boiling frog metaphor. They were not predicting any single catastrophic failure. They were observing an accumulation of small human surrenders.

There is a generation growing up right now who is living this on a daily basis. A recent Gallup poll found that 42 percent of Gen Z respondents believe that AI is harming their ability to think carefully and will make it harder for them to learn in the future.

These are children and young adults, still with developing human brains, forming their cognitive habits, their tolerance for difficulty, and their relationship with struggle, inside an environment that has been optimized to remove all of those things for them as efficiently as possible. The researchers warned explicitly of the risk of creating a generation that has lost the disposition to struggle productively without technological support. That is not a distant possibility. It is a trajectory in motion.

The irony at the center of all of this is that we have spent 150 years repeating a false story about how humans fail to notice gradual danger. We have repeated it uncritically, without checking, because it felt familiar and instinctively correct. Now the scientists documenting the most significant gradual cognitive shift of our time have reached for that same false story to name what they are seeing.

It’s time to rewrite the boiling frog story.

The frog with a functioning brain gets out of the water before it gets too hot.

That capacity to feel the rising temperature, to recognize what is happening, and to choose to respond is not a small thing. It is, in the context of this moment, very nearly everything.

The question worth asking is not whether we are using AI. Most people already are, and that will not change. The question is how we respond to the rising temperature.

Earlier this week we featured commentary on a disturbing viral photograph: IDF Under Fire After Troops Caught Destroying Statue Of Jesus With Sledgehammer.

The destruction of the statue took place in the Maronite Christian village of Debel, which is roughly 54 miles to the southeast of Beirut and situated just north of the border between Lebanon and Israel.

Photo taken by IDF soldiers

Since the onset of the war Israel began waging against Iran in March, Debel has come under heavy fire after a second front was created against Lebanon when the IDF resumed attacks against Hezbollah – and as Hezbollah began once again lobbing missiles into northern Israel.

The demographics of the village are almost entirely Christian, with 99.5% of registered voters adhering to the Christian faith, over 92% of whom are Maronite Catholics. In the 20th century, Christianity – made up chiefly of Lebanese Catholic and Eastern Orthodox believers – was actually the majority demographic of the small Mediterranean country.

At this point, Islam is a slight majority, but Christianity is still the most sizeable minority, also with the Lebanese President being a Christian along with top officials. But most of the American public remains ignorant of just how large and visible the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East remain, with many Westerners in general falsely assuming the whole of the Levant is somehow just “the Muslim world.”

Increasingly, outlets like Fox News have begun to little by little acknowledge the suffering of Lebanese and Palestinian Christians as Israel’s multi-front wars grind on. And this is why it is now such a sensitive issue for the Netanyahu government, which has already long ago lost the support of Tucker Carlson and some other big conservative names, even including some Christian leaders.

As of Tuesday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the soldier who struck the statue of Jesus with a sledgehammer, along with the soldier who photographed the incident, will receive 30 days of military detention. They will also be “removed from combat duty” following an inquiry – though there’s no indication they will be fully discharged from the army.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the aftermath of the photo circulating said he was “stunned and saddened” by what happened. The IDF in turn expressed “deep regret over the incident” – with the military also saying troops had replaced the damaged statue “in full co-ordination with the local community” shortly afterward.

But despite all of this public relations ‘clean-up’ – the tragic reality that remains is that Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian Christians will continue to die.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

The Left’s political imagination builds heroes, villains, and entire histories untethered from reality, substituting narrative for fact until it collapses under scrutiny.

Pseudo-Heroes

It is difficult to determine whether the bizarro worldview of the current Democrat-media nexus can simply be attributed to either its generic Trump Derangement Syndrome or the attendant Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner obsessive/compulsive disorder. But the crazy world of the Left increasingly bears scant resemblance to reality.

In this alternate universe, Eric Swalwell was a liberal icon and invaluable asset for years, though admittedly a bit randy and occasionally a serial sexual predator—a fact that the man himself made little effort to hide.

Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner was, at last, the Left’s “real thing,” the white working-class liberal stiff who could win back the hoi polloi—although he couldn’t get his story straight on whether his Nazi tattoo was an accident or supposed proof that he was brainwashed into Nazism by the toxic US military.

Tim Walz was also hailed as the Left’s Mr. Everyman, a truck-driving street fighter, although he is now in anti-American socialist Spain, at a time of war, libeling his own country and American soldiers as being in the service of a fascist cause.

Jeffrey Epstein was allegedly a mere eccentric autodidact, wannabe insider, and generous party host, though a bit too eager to use his girls to buy his way into liberal academic and intellectual circles.

Sam Bankman-Fried was a lovable genius gadfly, a billionaire slob, but with a big and timely checkbook for radical causes.

Jussie Smollett was to be the next George Floyd rallying cry, if only his ridiculous lies were not so ridiculous.

And George Floyd—multi-felon, ex-convict, past home invader who once stuck a pistol in a woman’s stomach, arrested while passing counterfeit bills, high on drugs, and resisting arrest—became the innocent martyr who died at the hands of diabolical, murderous police and set America afire.

Erasing Joe Biden

Along with such a pantheon, somehow the Democrat borg also fantasizes that the historic legacy of the Biden years has been squandered by Trump—as if the country suffers from collective amnesia.

But any sane person knows that Biden served as a waxen effigy, puppeteered by the radical Left to serve as a moderate veneer over the most radical agenda in modern memory.

In just four years, Biden’s handlers obliterated the southern border, admitting 10–12 million unvetted aliens, including an estimated 500,000 criminals, apparently as a demographic booster shot for their otherwise unpopular agendas.

Almost daily, we read of Americans assaulted, raped, and murdered by illegal aliens—stories almost always smothered in the left-wing media.

Rampant multibillion-dollar theft of US entitlement money by foreign nationals or recently naturalized citizens from Minneapolis to Los Angeles is also daily fare. The nihilistic Biden years of open borders have cost the nation untold amounts in blood and treasure. Yet the Left’s answer is to attack ICE officers attempting to enforce federal immigration law.

Stranger still is the contrast between protesters who seem to be mostly affluent, suburban white women. The latter, for some reason, seem to be free between 9 and 5 on workdays, to spit on, scream at, and obstruct ICE officers—whose ranks are working-class and 45 percent non-white.

All this is called progressivism: impeding the deportation of violent criminals who prey on poor neighborhoods, lacking the security that the protesters take for granted in their own protected enclaves.

The Biden puppeteers enriched and empowered theocratic Iran by lifting sanctions. They did little to nothing when Iranian proxies in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen serially attacked US installations and ships.

The Biden years saw near-record gas prices, 9 percent hyperinflation, all-time high crime spikes, and a president who even Democrats now admit was non compos mentis. He was toppled as a candidate for reelection by a coup of Democrat backroom politicos, but only after a disastrous debate. In his place, they and donors appointed a mostly inert Kamala Harris as nominee, who, as a 2020 presidential candidate, had failed to win a single delegate.

Iran Fantasies

The Left has created another fantasy world out of the current six-week Iran war.

When Trump warned on a Monday that the Iranian regime might face terrible punishment for its continued drone and missile attacks, he was libeled as a modern Nazi exterminator, hellbent on mass death. When on Tuesday Iran relented and asked for negotiations, Trump suddenly became smeared as a TACO naif, apparently too eager for peace. Each day, the Left tries to think up a new argument for American defeat, even as Iran suffers more one-sided damage. Their idea is to embolden Iran to hold out, in hopes that Trump—under constant left-wing assault, international pressure to lower gas prices, and his own restive Congressional allies—will fold and then be trashed by the Left as a TACO again.

More preposterously, the Left has peddled the fantasy that Trump’s demands for Iran to surrender its nuclear material (mostly hyper-enriched during the Biden administration) copied the Obama Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the so-called Iran deal.

But who could deny that, under Obama, the deal empowered Iran to rearm even more rapidly with lifted sanctions, nocturnal cash transfers, and the unfreezing of its assets?

The frenzied armament and empowerment of Iran either terrified or impressed the Obama administration enough to hatch the wacky idea of envisioning a Shiite crescent of Tehran, Damascus, Beirut, and Gaza. Such terrorist regimes would “balance” the moderate Arab states and democratic Israel in “creative tension.”

And the message to Iran was not nuclear disarmament, but slow, graduated nuclear armament, albeit of the sort to be completed during an administration to come.

In contrast, Trump’s deal was with an obliterated, prostrate Iranian military. The US fleet was in charge of the Strait of Hormuz and the blockade of Iran. More than 300 US combat aircraft could render Iran a medieval mess with impunity, should it persist in its terrorist agendas.

Begging a fully armed and defiant Iran merely to postpone its acquisition of a bomb is not the equivalent of dictating to a flattened Iran a series of demands that, if unmet, will lead to its veritable destruction—after it had already suffered the loss of a half-century investment in a half-trillion-dollar arsenal and military infrastructure.

In the surreal left-wing narrative, the more Iran lost its air force, navy, most of its missiles and drones, its command and control, its subterranean arsenals, its nuclear production facilities, and its factories that turn out weapons of war, the more the Democrat-media nexus declared the war lost and the Americans—after six weeks and 13 lost lives—to be trapped in a quagmire analogous to the war in Vietnam (eight years of war with 58,000 dead, 150,000 wounded).

Impeaching Pete Hegseth?

Examine another fantasy: the charade of a Democrat effort to impeach Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on silly charges of supposedly aiding an unauthorized war against Iran, war crimes, reckless handling of classified information, obstruction of Congressional oversight, abuse of power, politicization of the military, and conduct bringing disrepute to the US and its armed forces.

Each of these writs is either false or more aptly applies to the Biden and prior Democrat administrations.

Note that Hegseth, in a single year, fixed the years-long crisis of falling enlistment that he inherited. He has now even exceeded recruitment targets by emphasizing that soldiers should concentrate on combat effectiveness and not fixate on race, sex, or sexual orientation.

His Pentagon oversaw the summer 2025 destruction of Iranian nuclear facilities (with no fatalities), the military extradition of Nicolás Maduro and the recalibration of a once-rogue Venezuela (with no casualties), and the current six-week war that had destroyed the military capability of a once-feared, 93 million-person theocratic Iran (with 13 fatalities so far).

Hegseth has rebooted procurement with emphasis on far more excellent weapons rather than too few superb ones. Compare that to the prior secretary, Lloyd Austin, who went medically AWOL without informing the White House that he was incapacitated for 3–4 days in the ICU. He oversaw the Pentagon’s historic misadventure in Afghanistan and the constant attacks on US soldiers in the Middle East that went unanswered and emboldened Iran’s terrorist proxies. No Republican called for his impeachment.

The war in Iran is not “unauthorized”; it has not exceeded the 90-day limit under the War Powers Act. However, Barack Obama’s seven-month unauthorized bombing of Libya, under the Democrats’ current logic, really was a “war crime,” as was his “unauthorized,” months-long predator assassination campaign on the Afghan border that killed 500, including four US citizens.

The Congress that wants to impeach Hegseth should extend its gaze to Joe Biden’s 30-year unlawful possession of unsecured and classified documents and his use of them with an unauthorized ghostwriter who subsequently destroyed subpoenaed tapes with impunity.

The military has been depoliticized. That is, it no longer serves as a fast-track laboratory for the Left to try out its radical theories—transgenderism, racial tribalism, and unconstitutional racial prejudiced preferences.

Resuscitating Lawfare?

Finally, for over a decade, the Left has waged a coordinated, often extralegal effort to destroy the campaigns and presidency of Donald Trump. What lawfare did the Left not sanction?

The first impeachment hinging on the hearsay evidence on an unnamed pseudo-whistleblower who connived with the prevaricator Adam Schiff—with the acquiescence of a partisan inspector general?

The Russian collusion hoax orchestrated by the past and present Obama FBI and CIA?

The laptop disinformation campaign, to use the government to censor the news and promulgate the lie of a Russian-concocted Hunter Biden laptop on the eve of an election?

The unconstitutional effort to de-ballot Trump in 25 blue states?

The SWAT-like, staged raid on the then-ex-president’s home at Mar-a-Lago to find some 100 classified documents from more than 11,000 confiscated?

The pervasion of the legal system to wage four years of lawfare in five civil and criminal courtrooms?

Despite all that, we are now warned by Democrats like Susan Rice that when the Left regains power, they are going to restart their vendettas to punish their enemies.

An unbalanced politico, James Carville, advises the Democrats to keep quiet about their real plans upon returning to power: to pack the court to destroy the 157-year, nine-justice Supreme Court; to end the 66-year, 50-state Union with two new blue “states,” Puerto Rico and Washington, DC—all to obtain in an instant four new left-wing senators; and to kill off the 220-year-old Senate filibuster.

Carville is upset that the decade-long lawfare against Trump failed. So now he advocates expanding the warping of the justice system to charge Trump’s family and friends.

What is the one constant theme in this alternate left-wing universe?

No Democrat outlines an immigration agenda, a way to round up Biden’s criminal illegal alien entrants, an energy plan, a way to balance the budget, an anti-corruption agenda to stop the multibillion-dollar looting of the federal and state welfare systems, or a new strategic plan abroad. Instead, the party creates alternate realities that demand changing the system itself rather than working within it to appeal to the American voter.

Living with daily delusions and shrieking at Trump demons raging in their collective heads is no way to run a country.

The two-week Iran ceasefire ends Wednesday, and President Trump is saying he doesn’t plan to extend it if a second round of talks in Pakistan fail. These Islamabad talks, it should be noted, have not so much as even gotten off the ground.

President Trump has further said “lots of bombs” will fall if there is no deal, and if Iran doesn’t hand over its nuclear material. And yet the Iranians are remaining defiant and proving their resiliency by showing a sense of ‘normalcy’ has returned to Tehran and across much of the country. For example, the below is a fresh scene of bustling city life in the capital via AFP:

🇮🇷 Coffee shops bustling in Tehran as Middle East ceasefire nears end

Iranians gather in coffee shops in northern Tehran, as uncertainty grows over a push to stop the Middle East war from resuming. pic.twitter.com/svvALqngbT

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) April 21, 2026

Similar scenes have been portrayed going back to the second week of April. It was in the April 7-8 range that the ceasefire first took effect. 

Iran has also made clear its military and civic workers are rapidly rebuilding the country’s damaged and destroyed infrastructure, starting with rail lines, bridges, and energy sites.

But an even bigger gamble is the resumption of air travel. NBC freshly reports Tuesday, citing state sources, that “Domestic flights will resume in Iran starting tomorrow, Iran Air announced earlier today.”

“The semi-official news agency Fars reported that the airline announced flights would resume after a 50-day suspension caused by the war,” NBC continues. “The agency said a flight from Tehran to the eastern city of Mashhad is scheduled to depart tomorrow morning and a return flight will operate the same day.”

For well over a month airspace over Iran and the whole region was completely closed to commercial aviation, given the exchange of missiles made it highly dangerous. Again, the ceasefire could expire tomorrow, and it could be bombs away again.

As a reminder, the US and Israel actually directly attacked Iranian commercial aviation hubs amid the major Operation Epic Fury bombing campaign.

But the Iranian ‘regime’ is keen to demonstrate on the domestic front, but also on an international level, that it is indeed governing and remains firmly in control. The US and Israel have sought to overthrow the government, but that did not happen, and so leaders in Tehran want to demonstrate resolve even after President Trump claimed to have obliterated the country’s navy, air force, missile sites, and much of its armed forces.

Authored by Matthew Piepenburg via VonGreyerz.gold,

Below, we look soberly at the historical case of gold in the backdrop of current headlines and a global financial system nearing an eruption moment. 

Although the catalysts of oil, war, bond dysfunction, and bloated stocks may seem modern and unique, the current case for gold is as timeless and constant as nature itself.

Volcanic Parallels…

In May of 1980, David Alexander Johnston, a volcanologist for the United States Geological Survey, was manning an observation post 10 kilometers from the percolating volcano of Mount St. Helens in the state of Washington. 

On May 18th, he would be the first to report the volcano’s sudden eruption. 

Within in minutes, however, Johnston would be killed by the volcano’s “lateral blasts.” his body was never recovered, and 56 others would also perish—along with 7,000 big game animals, 12 million fish, 200 homes, 300 kilometers of highway and 15 kilometers of railway.

Although monitoring volcanos may seem entirely removed from monitoring economic shocks, there are volcanic rumblings beneath our global oil, credit, equity and currency markets which are about to erupt. 

Like Johnston, few realize just how quickly observation can suddenly turn to extreme danger.

In fact, the current “calm before the financial eruption” feels almost surreal when one compares the hard facts of the global oil, bond and Main Street indicators against a topping stock market and a completely indecipherable “conflict narrative” coming out of DC.

To make this “eruption announcement” economically clear and soberly real as opposed to just sensational, all we need is a moment of silence to consider simple math, the rhyming cadence of history and a modicum of realism (and common sense).

Let’s start with oil.

Oil’s Warning Meters

History reminds us that the last great “oil shocks” of 1973 and 1990 had massive ripple effects on U.S. markets and Main Street economies.

What is coming, however, will be far worse.

During the oil embargo period of 1973, for example, the world experienced a 7% deficit of oil supply. This resulted in a 300% oil price surge, a 52% fall in U.S. stocks (over 2 years) and a peak inflation level of over 12%.

Seventeen years later, during the Gulf War, the world saw a similar global oil deficit (7%), a 75% spike in oil prices and a 21% fall in U.S. stocks.

Fast forward to today, however, and we see an almost surreal moment of total disregard for such warnings as well as blindness to the financial volcano growling on the horizon.

Since the last oil tanker squeezed past the Strait of Hormuz in late February, global oil usage of 100 million barrels per day has fallen by 13%, as 13 million barrels per day have been delayed by the fog of war.

This marks a global oil deficit in 2026 of nearly twice the levels seen in 1973 and 1990, yet the U.S. stock market (always the last to get the memo) is trading at nearly all-time highs as of this writing.

This Is Crazy…

Globally, oil reserves are running out, including within the U.S., whose Strategic Petroleum Reserves are at half their 400M barrel level. 

The situation is far worse in Asia, India and Africa, whose last oil deliveries from the Hormuz Strait ended days ago. 

This explains why hotels are closed in Mumbai, and fishing trawlers are out of gas off the coast of Thailand.

As for Australia, the EU and the UK, their last deliveries out of Hormuz came on April 10th. 

Now their leaders are nervously trying to limit demand while hoping for a true and lasting cease-fire for an Iranian conflict driven by a Truth-Social account rather than professional diplomacy or even a rudimentary understanding of global finance.

Even if this conflict ended right now, the delayed economic effects from these record-breaking energy deficits are and will be extraordinary. 

This is not a fable but a fact.

Oil, which fuels the world, also transports the goods which feed and move the world. 

When oil prices rise, the cost of everything rises, including the food transported on ships running on oil, and which food is grown from fertilizers made from oil. 

Within the next few weeks, we could be looking at a humanitarian food crisis in the developing economies.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the University of Michigan’s Consumer Confidence Index is near the bottom as the S&P nears its peak—marking a total (and tragi-comical) disconnect from Main Street indicators and Wall Street mania, the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

Also never seen before in history is the surreal disconnect between the paper (Brent futures) price for oil and the actual sales (“dated Brent”) price for the commodity in real time – a gap of over $35 dollars.

This delta between real oil pricing and paper oil pricing represents a pathetic attempt by policy makers to psychologically suppress panic via the help of well – pure dishonesty.

But then again, dishonesty as a matter of policy is nothing new to broken financial regimes, a fact proven by inflation misreporting, recession denial or the latest frauds legalized on the COMEX.

(By the way, those governmental proxies front-running the fake futures oil price gambit are looking down the barrel of one heck of a short-squeeze unless this war – and spiking oil price – is not immediately resolved…)

In sum, what we are experiencing as of now is the worst oil supply deficit in history, about to humiliate a U.S. stock bubble at all-time highs, which is totally disconnected from Main Street at the same time a fertilizer/food crisis is about to erupt in the world’s most vulnerable economies.

And Then There’s the Bond Market…

But even such appalling conditions pale in comparison to what our global bond markets are telling us.

As I’ve repeated for years: “The bond market is the thing.” 

Boring? Perhaps. But bonds are absolutely critical. As sovereign bond demand tanks and hence bond yields rise, the cost of debt/borrowing rises. 

This is fatal to economies that now operate almost entirely on debt.

And there is no better measure of debt costs than the yield on 10-Year sovereign bonds, almost all of which are rising like shark fins around drowning (and debt-soaked) nations like the UK, Germany, the U.S. and Japan.

But what is even more remarkable in the global bond market is what we are seeing out of China, whose yields are falling, not rising. 

This means Chinese bonds have more demand than U.S. Treasuries, British Gilts, Japanese JGB’s and German Bunds, which also means the days of Western bond hegemony in general, and U.S. Treasury hegemony in particular, are witnessing an historical turning point, one which we have been forewarning for years. 

In the case of the U.S., the yield on the U.S. 10Y is creeping dangerously close toward its “Uh-Oh” recession-inducing red line of 4.6% to 4.8%.

At $40T in U.S. public debt, Uncle Sam simply cannot survive such rising yields. 

Regardless of who sits at the Federal Reserve Bank (which is neither “federal,” nor a “reserve” nor even a “bank”), trillions will need to be printed to buy America’s otherwise unloved, unwanted and weaponized IOUs.

Bessent may try a “soft default” of UST’s by illegally (yet in the name of “national security”) fixing yields lower and extending bond durations further out. 

But even such desperate measures will not stop the inevitable “mouse-clicking” of trillions in M0 Fed Balance Sheet dollars and M2 money supply expansion to save our bond markets at the expense of our currency.

In short, Uncle Sam will have no choice but to create bad money out of thin air to pay his own criminally negligent bar tab.

Even if peace were somehow declared today in the Middle East, the debt and currency damage was already fatally ill long before the conflict in Iran acted to accelerate the dying process.

Which brings us, of course, to real money vs. fake money…

All Roads Lead to Gold

The now undeniable destruction of the dollar’s absolute purchasing power and the desperate yet failed measures to somehow reclaim dollar hegemony are beyond debate. 

The USA and its dollar will not end, but their hegemony is already (and will continue) declining. Regardless of whatever happens next in Iran or elsewhere, the die for U.S. debt, and hence the USD, was cast long ago.

Yes, there is so much change everywhere and every day, especially now. We all see this. 

But such blunt-speak is not anti-American. It is financial realism and simple pattern recognition, for despite all speculations, squawking pundits, changing headlines, tweets, and armchair military guessing, nothing has really changed at all…

History reminds us again and again that broken nations over their skis in failed and extended wars, extreme deficit spending and political mismanagement have always debased their currencies to temporarily save their political optics and near-term legacies.

This has always meant “temporary prosperity followed by permanent ruin” created by a handful of “political and economic opportunists,” who, as Hemingway warned, take their nations toward currency destruction and war – the very scenario in which we now openly find ourselves.

As the world reserve currency slowly loses its trust, faith, credibility and purchasing power in such a classic yet historically familiar backdrop, gold, as it has done for thousands of years, will continue to honestly rise in a setting of now almost comical dishonesty.

Like David Johnston, many of us have been watching the financial debt volcano rumble in the distance. 

As of 2026, that volcano is now erupting. It is now up to each of us to avoid being swept away by its “lateral blasts” of paper currency destruction.

In other words, it’s up to each of us to own honest and real money to protect ourselves from the financial lava flowing our way.

The first-order effect of the U.S.-Iran conflict and the resulting shutdown of the Hormuz chokepoint was the disruption of global energy flows, from LNG to crude to refined products. The second-order effect was a spike in petrochemical prices and a widening shortage of key industrial inputs. Now the third-order effects are beginning to hit everyday goods, with Malaysia-based Karex, the world’s largest condom maker, warning that prices are about to explode.

Karex CEO Goh Miah Kiat spoke with Reuters in an exclusive interview about his plan to hike condom prices by 20% to 30%, and possibly more, as the war in Iran continues to disrupt supply chains and drive up critical input and shipping costs.

“The situation is definitely very fragile, prices are expensive… We have no choice but to transfer the costs right now to the customers,” Goh said.

He said costs have increased for everything from synthetic rubber and nitrile used in manufacturing condoms to packaging materials and lubricants such as aluminum foil and silicone oil.

Earlier this month, Goldman analyst Georgina Fraser warned clients about petrochemical shock worsening across Asia, with textile and packaging plants emerging as the first major downstream casualties. 

“The supply shock is transmitting faster and at a greater magnitude than we had anticipated,” Fraser warned in the note. 

Reuters noted, “The condom maker joins a growing list of companies, including medical glove makers, bracing for supply chain bottlenecks as the Iran war strains energy ​and petrochemical flows from the Middle East, disrupting procurement of raw materials.” 

At the same time, Kiat said condom demand has surged 30% so far this year, with shipping disruptions further exacerbating shortages. He noted that shipping times to the U.S. and Europe are now two months, up from one month previously.

“We’re seeing a lot more condoms actually sitting on vessels that have not arrived at their destination but are highly required,” Goh added. He noted that many developing countries do not have large condom supplies.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

In a stunning display of racial exclusion dressed up as “equity,” a California school district barred white students from a taxpayer-funded field trip centered on “social justice.”

Albany Unified School District (AUSD) organized the overnight trip to Virginia exclusively for “young men and women of color” from Albany High School. White kids stayed home while their non-white classmates toured Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), visited civil rights sites, and held discussions on social justice, leadership, and self-awareness.

The trip was officially approved by the board of education and cost the district $42,845. Documents obtained by the parental rights group Defending Education and shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation lay bare the full scope of this race-based program.

EXCLUSIVE: California School Sent Kids On Segregated Field Trip For ‘Social Justice’: ‘Organizing programs and initiatives around racial categories’ https://t.co/hxkfukWnkn

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 20, 2026

“This unique mentoring program encourages Albany High School young men and women of color to develop social, personal, and academic success skills,” the board document states. “Students gather in a safe, supportive, and empowering environment to voice their needs and challenges. The students engage in enriching discussions on social justice, education, leadership, mental well-being, and self-awareness. This mentoring program is transforming the lives of young men and women of color to make a significant global impact in society.”

Along with HBCU tours, participants visited the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial, and the Black Heritage Trail.

This is not an isolated incident. AUSD maintains a host of other race-specific initiatives. Its 2025-2026 Local Control and Accountability Plan includes “Young Men of Color and Young Women of Color Programs” aimed at providing “social emotional supports to most underserved students” as part of a $1,257,234 budget line for mental health efforts. The district also pushes “professional development” for staff on “culturally responsive/anti-racist pedagogy” to support “student groups who are persistently and historically underserved.”

Hiring practices follow the same pattern. A 2026 superintendent report outlines goals to “Recruit and Retain a Diverse, High Quality Staff” through “equitable recruitment pipelines,” “affinity-based supports,” and a “Black Teacher Project.” The district even tracks staff demographics as a measure of success.

AUSD’s website further details a protocol for any potential ICE activity on campus, instructing staff “NOT to provide any information” and declaring the district a “safe haven” for immigrant families. It also openly states its aim of “Recruiting and retaining excellent, diverse teachers.”

The district did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Paul Runko, senior director of strategic initiatives at Defending Education, condemned the approach.

“Students and teachers are best served when opportunities are based on merit and individual need, not immutable characteristics like race and ethnicity,” Runko noted.

He added, “Schools should focus their limited time and resources on challenging high-achieving students, supporting those who are struggling, and ensuring all students receive a high-quality education, rather than organizing programs and initiatives around racial categories. Great, hard-working teachers should be supported, mentored, and retained for their effectiveness in the classroom, not based on race or any other characteristic.”

The story ignited immediate backlash on X. Defending Education president Nicki Neily posted details of the affinity groups and district-funded trip, highlighting how AUSD maintains these race-based programs.

The district plans also include staffing goals tied to racial composition, including recruitment and retention programs for teachers of color and district benchmarks for increasing workforce diversity. https://t.co/EzD3gnex1n

— Nicki Neily (@nickineily) April 20, 2026

Other users quickly labeled it revived segregation. One commenter noted the broader pattern, pointing out that districts like LAUSD run identical race-exclusive trips for Black students to visit HBCUs.

Posts sharing the development described it as “no whites allowed” programming and accused the left of teaching minority children to view race through a lens of division rather than unity.

No whites allowed: School district sends kids ‘of color’ on cross-country ‘social justice’ field trip https://t.co/yMN9BGqdWN via @worldnetdaily

— Deborah Toppings (@karas13133) April 21, 2026

This episode exposes the core contradiction in today’s woke education machine. The same activists who lecture endlessly about dismantling “systemic racism” have no problem erecting racial barriers when it suits their narrative. In California, where open-border policies and sanctuary rules already strain public resources, school districts like Albany Unified double down on identity politics instead of delivering color-blind excellence.

Taxpayers are left footing the bill for programs that sort children by skin color, train staff in ‘anti-racist’ (racist) ideology, and prioritize demographic quotas over classroom results. Meanwhile, every student—regardless of background—loses out when schools abandon merit for grievance.

The push for “social justice” has produced the very segregation civil rights leaders once fought to end. Districts chasing racial affinity groups and exclusive trips are not healing divides; they are widening them at public expense.

Public schools exist to educate children, not to engineer racial outcomes or indulge activist fantasies. Until districts like Albany Unified face real accountability, this taxpayer-funded racial sorting will only accelerate.

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