For three hours, Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a chief architect of the COVID Pandemic Panic, sat in front of Rand Paul’s Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and refused to say anything other than that he was invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

Quite literally, for three hours, that was his response to every question. This despite having a full pardon from President Joe Biden for anything he might have done as NIAID Director.

With much less fanfare but no less significance, Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh gave his own presentment of obfuscation, giving a forty-five minute press briefing in the wake of the July meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee and managing to avoid explaining at all why the FOMC chose to stand pat on the federal funds rate for the seventh month in a row.

Anyone hoping for fresh insights into the debacle that was the COVID Pandemic Panic, or how the Federal Reserve intends to force consumer price inflation back to the Holy Grail level of 2 percent year on year came away today disappointed.

Between Fauci’s Senate testimony and Warsh’s press conference, a ginormous amount of words were spoken. Between Fauci’s Senate testimony and Warsh’s press conference, not a damn thing was said.

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Pardon? What Pardon? I Plead The Fifth

I’m rather glad I gave my observations about Anthony Fauci reacting to the release of his diary entries rather than waiting for yesterday’s Senate hearing. At least with the diary entries there was material inviting commentary.

What commentary can one have over someone invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination?

What was notable about Fauci’s testimony is that he invoked right away, at the conclusion of his opening remarks.

Mr. Chairman. Member Peters. Members of the committee, I served at the NIH for over 54 years, 38 of those as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Over that period, I proved that I believe in and respect the value of legitimate congressional oversight. In fact, I testified before and or briefed Senate and House committees Well over 200 times over those 38 years. During and after the COVID pandemic, I have appeared multiple times for hearings in the Senate and the House, usually under oath and sat for several days long transcribed sworn interviews, answering questions about the very issues that are now the subject of this hearing.

However, given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote.

Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion. Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions. Thank you.

The irony, of course, is that it is impossible for Anthony Fauci to incriminate himself with respect to the COVID Pandemic Panic. As one of his last acts before leaving office, President Joe Biden, via the infamous autopen, signed a blanket pardon covering everything Fauci might have done for the decade prior.

The presence of the pardon not only made Fauci’s invocation of the Fifth Amendment bizarre, it arguably made it criminal. For 130 years, the Supreme Court has held that a person who is immune from prosecution1, who cannot therefore incriminate himself, has no Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Fauci’s persistence in pleading the Fifth was completely boundless, extending even to refusing to answer the most basic questions, such as whether a red folder was in front of him.

Yes, that really happened.

With Fauci refusing to provide any answers at all, the hearing quickly devolved into the typical Washington Clown World theatrics, with Senators in both parties posturing and angling for catchy sound bites. By the end of the hearing some three hours later, absolutely nothing new had been learned. No new information was revealed. Three hours of words, and not a damn thing got said.

Forward Guidance? Try “No Guidance”

Kevin Warsh’s FOMC press briefing was shorter and without the histrionics which are de rigueur for any Congressional action. However, it was as noncommunicative as Fauci’s non-testimony when it came to clarifying Federal Reserve policy on interest rates and consumer price inflation. Not only did Kevin Warsh make good on his commitment to offer no forward guidance at the press briefing, he did his level best to provide no guidance at all.

With the very first question, Warsh chose to bob and weave rather than answer directly even a simple question about what he sensed Wall Street was telling him about where interest rates needed to go next.

Reporter: Thank you for taking our questions, Mr. Chairman. You’ve had a couple months now or nine weeks or whatever number it is to see the markets behave in the absence of forward guidance. I’m wondering if you could tell me what message are you getting from the markets as to where policy ought to be right now?

Kevin Warsh: Yeah, so I think officially it’s eight weeks and four days, but I’m not counting. The message from markets is the message from markets. What I’ve really been trying to do, Steve, as I think you appreciate, your colleagues appreciate, is getting an unfiltered message from markets, getting a direct message, letting buyers and sellers meet at prices for treasuries, for the foreign exchange value of the dollar, and then trying to judge for ourselves, what does that mean about our remit? How are we doing on inflation? How are we doing on employment? We’re trying not to interfere with that market signal. That’s part of the reason why we’ve been somewhat spare in our words when we pulled back from forward guidance. So they’re reacting to events, I would say, much more directly over the 42 days since we last met. This is a good thing.

As I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we’ve seen a material tightening, not just in nominal rates, but in real rates, too. And we’re observing it. We’re trying to stay out of that because, you know, many of you might be interested in our reaction function. We’re interested in the reaction of financial markets.

As for what message Kevin Warsh is hearing from Wall Street? Good luck finding it in that answer, because it isn’t there—a fact the reporter noticed and called Warsh out on that omission.

Reporter: I get that, Mr. Chairman. And I guess the follow-up question is, if the markets are talking to you, what do you hear them saying? And if it’s real rates or higher, it would suggest that that’s where the funds rate ought to go.

Kevin Warsh: I’m sorry, it’s your question. So, interpreting markets is an imperfect business. We central bankers like market pros can think these things are overdetermined, but let me offer some speculation.

First, as we said in the FOMC statement that you got at 2 o’clock, the economy output It’s solid. CapEx and productivity are strong. Labor markets solid, steady. The bond market, the treasury market, it seems to be saying that as well. If I were to try to break down, disaggregate the treasury market signals, I wouldn’t be able to do it perfectly. But the bond market’s saying many of those same things, and that’s why we’re seeing a tightening both in nominals and in reals. Even while at some level we haven’t done much in 42 days, the markets have done quite a bit.

Note that Kevin Warsh said as little in his second answer as in his first.

That was the theme throughout the press briefing. When asked what role July’s cooler than expected CPI print played in yesterday’s FOMC rate decision, Warsh went into an extended ramble about avoiding data dependence and the Fed’s task force on avoiding data dependence.

I’d like to believe that the committee shares my views, which is the historic problem with data dependence is the data and the dependence. We are not relying on any one individual piece of data as cover or as an excuse or as validation.

What I care about and what I think the committee cares about is trends on the data. I’m sure we got some encouraging inflation data. I think at the meeting 42 days ago I said something like 63 months of inflation above target. I didn’t say 64, though the final calculation might be a close one. So we’ll be watching inflation data over the period ahead.

But I also don’t want you to leave the misimpression that we’re sort of breathlessly waiting that.

I’ve called for a task force to revisit both the private and public data we use to make our decision making. That task force is out doing their work. I’ll be checking back in with them the next couple of weeks.

But I wouldn’t say we overly relied on any one piece of data, including that data, which surprised some a couple of weeks ago.

Note what Kevin Warsh did not say: he did not say anything about trends in inflation—the very thing he claims as the center of his focus.

The press conference only went downhill from there.

Unsurprisingly, Wall Street was not pleased. Even though they had projected the FOMC would stand pat on the federal funds rate, after hearing Warsh’s non-answers, stocks dropped precipitously.

Treasuries were similarly nonplussed by Warsh’s non-answers. After holding steady through much of the day, yields began rising as Warsh began speaking.

Only the two-year treasuries responded well to the Warsh press briefing.

A Day Of Non-Communication

On the surface, lumping Fauci’s pleading the Fifth before the Senate with Kevin Warsh announcing the FOMC interest rate decision might seem an odd combination. Certainly we would find little in common between hearings on the COVID Pandemic Panic and a press briefing on interest rates. However, with both happening on the same day, they both stand as ironic bookends of a day of deliberate, willful, non-communications.

Perversely, Kevin Warsh went into his press briefing with the same mindset Anthony Fauci had in his Senate appearance: say as little as possible, and preferably nothing. Both Kevin Warsh and Anthony Fauci clearly succeeded, much to the chagrin of everyone around both men, including the media.

Ironically, the fact that Warsh and Fauci set out to say nothing and succeeded is the most newsworthy aspect of both stories. Kevin Warsh said plainly in his first FOMC presser that he wanted Wall Street to look beyond the Fed for signals about how financial markets should regard interest rates. Anthony Fauci said plainly in his opening statement he would give no further information to Senator Rand Paul and the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

Wall Street got no further signal from Kevin Warsh. Rand Paul got no further information from Anthony Fauci.

Yet Wall Street was able to process that lack of signal, recognize the uncertainty endemic in Warsh’s approach to the Fed Chairmanship, and repriced both equities and Treasuries accordingly. The lack of signal proved to not be the same as a lack of information.

Rand Paul, through repeated questions, all of which Fauci declined to answer, articulated in full view of the American public all the details already known about Fauci’s misconduct as NIAID Director, including his illicit dealings with EcoHealth and Chinese virology labs in Wuhan. Fauci pleaded the Fifth and so left all statements against him uncontested—an ironic proof of the legal maxim “qui tacet consentire videtur” (“he who is silent is taken to agree”).

Both Wall Street and the Senate Republicans, given the respective silences of Kevin Warsh and Anthony Fauci, were left to ponder a relevant question: “What aren’t they saying?”

What was Kevin Warsh not saying about inflation, or the state of the economy? Will oil supply shocks derail a growing economy? Is inflation about to sink back to the Holy Grail level of 2% without any further Fed intervention?

Why was Fauci not denying the accusations levied against him? He called Rand Paul’s public statements against him “slanderous”, yet when presented with the opportunity to defend himself against those same public statements, Fauci chose silence—and presumably consent. Was Fauci acquiescing to the truth of what Rand Paul has been saying? Was denial no longer a plausible option for Anthony Fauci?

Both Kevin Warsh and Anthony Fauci, in their respective domains, had the perfect platform to broadcast their views across the mediaverse. Both Kevin Warsh and Anthony Fauci had not just a bully pulpit, but a bully megaphone to go with it. Both Kevin Warsh and Anthony Fauci chose to use neither the bully pulpit nor the bully megaphone.

At both the FOMC presser and Anthony Fauci’s Senate hearing, a ginormous number of words were spoken on all sides. Despite all those words, the most significant statement by both Kevin Warsh and Anthony Fauci was not a damn thing.

Irony abounds.

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The new Federal Reserve press policy apparently is not to actually answer any questions at all.

Wall Street was not pleased.

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The question on everyone’s mind after this—what is Anthony Fauci hiding?

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Much like Donald Trump’s prime time speech on July 16th on election integrity, Senator Rand Paul’s weekend data dump from Anthony “The Science™” Fauci’s personal diaries provides considerable detail about the corruption behind the COVID Pandemic Panic Narrative—but that tranche of detail serves once again mainly to confirm what we already knew.

Just as with Trump’s speech, this is not a criticism of Rand Paul’s disclosures. In the real world, confirmation is every bit as important as revelation, and what Trump and Paul both have provided—with ample receipts—is considerable confirmation.

What the corporate media dismissed and claimed had been “debunked” is once again proven to have been completely accurate. Far from being “conspiracy theory”, several hypotheses about the origins and epidemiology of the SARS-CoV-2 virus have been shown to be “conspiracy fact.”

This matters because the salient facts about the SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID were covered. The important details were reported—by myself and by others. The crucial evidence was presented to a candid world.

The data was always there, and corporate media chose to ignore it all. The data was always there, and government chose to lie about its very existence. The data was always there, and some people chose to trust narrative over proven empirical facts.

Thanks to Fauci’s diaries, once again this is not speculation. This is confirmed fact. This is yet another proven empirical fact demolishing the narratives put forward by Fauci, and amplified by corporate media.

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Lab-Made, Not Nature-Made

As the SARS-CoV-2 virus was found to be spreading around the globe, one narrative corporate media was quick to quash was the possibility the SARS-CoV-2 virus was a biological weapon, or at least was the product of biological weapons research.

Yet even in February of 2020, the evidence was clear that such possibilities, while not proven, were hardly disproven and could not be ruled out—even though corporate media tried to do exactly that.

Yet we cannot ignore such stories, because often the "conspiracy theory" narrative turns out to have more substance than the narratives of the legacy media. We must not forget that it was the "conspiracy theorists" at alternative media sites such as ZeroHedge that first drew the world's attention to the coronavirus, while the legacy media has been a primary purveyor of misinformation and pro-China propaganda.

What corporate media did its level best to obscure from the outset was the very real factual basis for contemplating the SARS-CoV-2 virus as a bioweapon. At the same time the virus was spreading around the globe, researchers were publishing data detailing the unusual furin-cleavage site within a particular spike protein, something not found in any similar coronaviruses1.

In 2019, a new coronavirus (2019-nCoV) infecting Humans has emerged in Wuhan, China. Its genome has been sequenced and the genomic information promptly released. Despite a high similarity with the genome sequence of SARS-CoV and SARS-like CoVs, we identified a peculiar furin-like cleavage site in the Spike protein of the 2019-nCoV, lacking in the other SARS-like CoVs. In this article, we discuss the possible functional consequences of this cleavage site in the viral cycle, pathogenicity and its potential implication in the development of antivirals.

This research was not the “smoking gun” evidence that the virus was engineered many alternative-media journalists claimed it to be, but it was a troubling finding that cut deeply against the narrative pushed by Fauci and others that the virus emerged naturally in the wild.

Even Fauci was at the very least suspicious (fearful?) that the virus was a manmade creation which escaped from a lab. We know this because he states this in his personal diary entries.

In his diary, Fauci mused, “There was not total agreement about the likelihood of deliberate insertion” – speaking of the engineering of the virus in a lab. He then revealed that only two seemed to openly disagree with the possibility of the lab leak theory. All of the other scientists believed it was very possible.

It is important to note that January 2020 was before the lockdowns had started and was also before the World Health Organization had even declared it a pandemic.

Fauci continued:

Ron Fouchier said he was sure that this could occur naturally and we should not waste our time and divert effort to pursue this. This is expected of him since he was the original GOF person with Yoshi Kawaoka. Also, Christian Drosten was with Ron; the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible and given the fact that Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go. We decided to have Jeremy with Francis to contact Tedros with Stewart Simonson’s help (I arranged this) to see if Tedros would convene experts. [Emphasis added].

Despite that, Fauci spent years publicly dismissing the credible lab leak theory as a wild conspiracy. Yet, he often struck a softer tone in his diary, asserting that no one is “100% certain of the origin,” including himself.

Anthony Fauci did not consider a laboratory origin for the virus to be at all outside the realm of probability, and was even amenable to the notion the virus was specifically engineered as a bioweapon. That was what he confided in his private diary.

Publicly, he encouraged virologists to embrace a natural origin for the virus, which is how we got scientific media coverage such as this headline from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, under which leading “expert” virologists such as Kristian Andersen, PhD argued the evidence of a man-made origin for SARS-CoV-2 was in fact no evidence of a man-made origin for SARS-CoV-2.

But that was before he learned more about COVID-19 and related coronaviruses, which have features already seen in nature. "There are lots of data and lots of evidence, as well as previous examples of this coming from nature," he said. "We have exactly zero evidence or data of this having any connection to a lab."

In fact the evidence connecting SARS-CoV-2 to not one but multiple labs was already circulating in the research media, and among alternative media outlets. The evidence was not merely knowable, it was known.

Fauci intentionally sought to discredit that evidence, and persuade people not to look closely at it. There can be no denying that is true, because Fauci’s own diary entries prove that it is true—and corporate media aided and abetted him at every turn.

Ask yourself why that is.

Fellating Fauci

We must understand that Anthony Fauci did not work alone. He had help. He not only had allies within the first Trump Administration but he had presumed friends within corporate media. High up on the “friends” list, we learn from Fauci’s diary entries, was CNN anchor Jake Tapper.

It was apparent from the earliest days of the Pandemic Panic that corporate media’s coverage of the emerging coronavirus disease now known as COVID was a hot mess: what wasn’t simply incompetent journalism was corrupt propaganda pushing a false narrative about the disease.

Despite the obvious parallels to the 2003 virus scare of SARS, corporate media simply ignored health reports coming out of China for over a week at the start of 2020.

Only after the second SCMP story did the Associated Press pick up the story. Even then, it was not the legacy media but alternative media news aggregator ZeroHedge that gave the story wider distribution, pulling together the narrative threads from the SCMP and AP articles, and highlighting the health risks posed by coronavirus infections.

On January 6, Newsweek (a legacy media ghost at this point in its history), ran a story ruling out the SARS virus as the pathogen behind the disease. Also on that date, Time Magazine ran a story on the two cases of the disease identified in the United States and Bloomberg offered up a “quick take” segment.

Was corporate media attempting to downplay a story it simply did not want people to know was unfolding? Reaching that conclusion might be an evidentiary stretch, but it is hardly outside the realm of possibility.

Why would corporate media want to suppress the story? Because Anthony Fauci wanted to suppress the story, or at least control its narrative arc—and because sycophantic schlubs like Jake Tapper were only too eager to cultivate close relationships with the likes of Anthony Fauci.

We knew then that corporate media was dropping the ball on covering the emerging disease. We now know from Fauci’s diary entries that corporate media had clear conflicts of interest which compromised their coverage from the outset. That much is clear from Fauci’s commentary about Jake Tapper being a frequent dinner guest at Fauci’s home—dinners Fauci viewed as about cultivating “friendship”.

“Had dinner at my home with Jake and Jennifer Tapper,” Fauci jotted down. “Relaxed, good time.”

Fauci added, “Jake clearly believes that Trump is totally nuts.”

The diary entry came nine days after Fauci said Americans would be better off ditching their Thanksgiving plans.

“You may have to bite the bullet and sacrifice that social gathering, unless you’re pretty certain that the people that you’re dealing with are not infected,” Fauci told CBS News at the time.

Fauci previously wrote on July 1, 2020 he “had dinner over at Jake Tapper and Jen Tapper’s home in DC.” He said they were a “terrific couple” and the meal was “friendship building.”

One does not need a degree in journalism to see the conflict of interest inherent in Tapper basking in the attentions of a major government figure such as Anthony Fauci. Such relationships invariably make the journalist part of the story, and that has always been a cardinal sin in professional journalism.

There was a time when such ethical considerations mattered. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary editor of the New York Times in the 1970s and 1980s, made the ethics of professional distance in journalism plain, apocryphally quoted as telling one New York Times staffer “I don’t care if you f*** an elephant, just so long as you don’t cover the circus.”

Perhaps Jake Tapper never heard of Abe Rosenthal. Perhaps he just never paid attention to what the giants of journalism had to say about the profession of journalism. Perhaps he felt that, if he just fellated Fauci rather than f*** Fauci, he could still cover the circus side show of COVID Pandemic Panic Propaganda that Fauci orchestrated.

Even if Jake Tapper never entertained such thoughts, it is quite clear that other corporate media faux “journalists” did.

We know that because corporate media failed to accurately report on the growing disparities between COVID pandemic predictions and the documented pandemic fatalities.

We know that because corporate media grotesquely overstated hospitalizations from COVID and the strain put on hospital resources at the height of the COVID Pandemic Panic.

The data was always available. The facts were always right at corporate media’s fingertips.

Corporate media chose not to look at the data.

Corporate media chose not to study the facts.

Ask yourself why that is.

One Lie After Another

The one thing that Fauci’s friends in corporate media could not do, however, is conceal Fauci’s lies forever. The more Fauci basked in a media spotlight, the more it became clear just how corrupt, how political, how malicious he truly was (and still is).

After his lies about face masks were revealed in the fall of 2021, fresh attention was directed at his many scientific and ethical lapses over the years.

Far from being the paragon of scientific virtue he made himself out to be, Anthony Fauci was quickly revealed to be the most political of scientists—and thus the worst of scientists—since Troyfim Lysenko, Stalin’s chief agricultural scientist and principal architect of the Ukrainian famine known today as the Holodomor.

Just as did Lysenko under Stalin, Fauci readily proposed public health policies and pontificated about Big Pharma’s mRNA innoculations in ways that were flatly at odds with the empirical data, and which indisputably contributed to untold numbers of inoculation-related injuries and deaths.

Perversely, Fauci did this even as he himself experienced a potentially life-threatening adverse reaction to the mRNA inoculations, in the form of a pulmonary infarct (the result of a pulmonary embolism). The infarct and the embolisms are known potential side effects of the mRNA inoculations, yet Fauci not only kept mum about his own brush with mortality, but kept pushing the inoculations in spite of their obvious lethality as a side effect.

While Fauci continued to push the inoculations, however, spinning up one lie after another, the data continued to accumulate both that the inoculations were ultimately completely ineffective as well as toxic and downright deadly.

The Data Has Always Been Available

Reading through Fauci’s diary entries, we are reminded again how utterly depraved both political and media figures were regarding the COVID Pandemic Panic. We are reminded again that they lied deliberately and repeatedly, with both malice and forethought.

Yet we must also remember that it was obvious even at the time that Fauci and others were lying. We must remember that the empirical and epidemiological data never supported any part of corporate media’s COVID Pandemic Panic narrative. What was demonstrably proven and known about the virus contradicted everything Fauci and his ilk were telling people.

We must remember that the COVID Pandemic Panic was in many regards the ultimate victory for the “conspiracy theorists” within independent and alternative media. As Senator John Kennedy quipped during Kash Patel’s FBI confirmation hearing, “we need to get some new conspiracy theories because all the old ones turned out to be true.”

SARS-CoV-2 is a lab creation and not a natural virus.

The lockdowns were always a failure.

The PCR tests were grossly inflated and completely misleading.

COVID was never an actual pandemic.

All the data needed to establish the truth of each of these propositions was readily available and accessible in 2020. None of it was concealed. All of it was ignored or misrepresented by corporate media. All of it was denied by governments everywhere.

All of the data needed to understand that Anthony Fauci was and is a malignant and sociopathic liar was out there for people to study even then.

Most importantly, all of this data was reported on by more than one alternative or independent media outlet. There were—and are—reliable sources of information out there. Corporate media does not have half the control over news and information they want you to believe they do.

Perversely, the data even proves that. One just has to look at alternative media coverage of the COVID Pandemic Panic.

I say “I told you so” because much of my work in 2020 and 2021 centered on the COVID Pandemic Panic and the disconnects between the narratives and the data. Yet much more was also covered by the likes of Alex Berenson, and in alternative media outlets such as ZeroHedge and The Aeon Chronicle.

Nearly every major aspect of Fauci’s diary entries is something which was researched and reported by alternative and independent media outlets at the time.

Just as was the case with Donald Trump’s prime-time address, Fauci’s diary entries serve not as revelation but as confirmation. The “conspiracy theorists” were right all along.

If there were any lingering doubts about that before now, Fauci’s diary entries puts them all to rest permanently.

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Since then, the US and Iran have been engaging in an increasing series of tit-for-tat strikes, with the US hammering Qeshm Island and several cities in the south of Iran, while Iran retaliates against US bases as well as the infrastructure of Iran’s Arab neighbors.

The prevailing narratives have all been stoking fears of a “wider war.” Yet the real risk has always been that the war will drag on.

The longer the US and Iran are at war, the longer the Strait of Hormuz will be shuttered. The longer the US and Iran are at war, the longer Persian Gulf oil will be stoppered up behind the Strait, forcing increasing shut-ins of production wells around the Gulf. The longer the US and Iran are at war, the higher the price of oil, the higher the price of oil’s refined products, and the greater the magnitude of the inevitable supply shock that will hit global markets.

There is no version of that which is not acutely painful for the entire world, oil importers and oil exporters alike. Some version of that is an increasingly probable outcome for the war—and sooner rather than later.

Welcome to Oilpocalypse Maybe.

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War Update

The baseline facts of the war since the collapse of the ceasefire are little more than a repetition of earlier news reports: The US and Iran are trading air strikes, missile strikes, and drone strikes. Civilian infrastructures are coming under attack. Neither side seems all that interested in another ceasefire.

While narratives are fearful of a “wider war”, there is little sign of a war substantially different from the one before the the Memorandum of Understanding. There has been little sign of the war expanding to theaters beyond the Persian Gulf states. While Israel has not yet rejoined the fight, it is not hard to imagine them soon opting to do so, particularly if the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen continue to make noises about blockading the Bab al-Mandeb Strait at the entrance to the Red Sea. Already, the Houthis have claimed credit for attacks on two tankers in the Red Sea.

Regional mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Pakistan are continuing to push resurrecting the Memorandum of Understanding and its 60-day ceasefire, but are meeting with lukewarm enthusiasm at best. President Trump is reported as willing to listen to ceasefire proposals, but is building up forces in the region as he listens, a clear sign that a major military attack against Iran is likely to happen in the near future.

In the end, the options for the US are effectively reduced to two:

• Option 1: Pursue a new 10-day ceasefire aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

• Option 2: Launch a massive joint military campaign with Israel to force Tehran’s capitulation.

Iran’s choices are not much different.

• Option 1: Pursue a new 10-day ceasefire aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

• Option 2: Launch a massive campaign against the whole of the Persian Gulf to force the US to back down.

Capitulation or conquest. Those are the choices for both sides.

At the moment, Option 2 seems to be the preferred choice for both sides.

President Trump is steadily building forces in the region, while telling the media that, with the attacks to date, the US has been “nice.”

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, for his part, is warning the US that Iran will attack Arab infrastructures in the region if the US targets Iranian infrastructures.

Persian Gulf Oil Is Not Flowing

Meanwhile, traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has collapsed yet again. It had not fully recovered from its closure in March, but what little traffic increase there had been has been snuffed out by the resumption of hostilities.

Oil is not flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, period. Not Saudi oil, not United Arab Emirates oil, not Iraqi oil, not Iranian oil. At present, no Persian Gulf oil is flowing.

The ramifications of the Strait’s closure are easily seen in oil production data from around the Persian Gulf.

After the Strait’s initial closure, oil production fell around the Gulf, and continued falling through April. Some recovery was achieved in May, as the ceasefire talks gained traction. June, with the advent of the MoU and its brief ceasefire, saw substantial recovery in oil production volumes.

With the Strait effectively closed once more, June’s recovery will not be repeated in July. March’s production declines almost certainly will be repeated in July.

Energy Price Inflation Is Here

Oil prices are already reflecting this likely outcome, with both Brent Crude and West Texas Intermediate climbing steadily since the ceasefire broke down.

Tellingly, the spread between the September and October contracts, which had all but disappeared during the ceasefire, has widened dramatically, with the September Brent contract nearly $5/bbl more than the October contract, and West Texas Intermediate almost as bad. The market is pricing in a greater oil supply dislocation up front, with some mitigation later on.

There is little optimism to be found in oil prices. At $96/bbl for Brent (September Contract) as of this writing, it is only a matter of days before the $100/bbl threshold is breached. It might even happen before the weekend.

As the price of crude goes, so goes the price of oil’s refined products. Diesel prices are up by nearly a third since the start of July, with Asia and Europe enduring the greatest price increases thus far.

A vital trucking fuel is more expensive by nearly a third just since the start of July, with no discernible sign of reversing its upward trend. That is never going to end well for anyone.

Gasoline prices are up slightly less than diesel, with contract prices for reformulated gasoline “only” up 18% since the start of July.

Fuel prices are already revealing where they will be felt the most. Bunker fuel prices have risen very nearly $100/metric ton in Asia, and approximately $70/metric ton in the US.

As was the case before, the economic impacts of the Strait’s closure hit Asia far more severely than America or even Europe. Energy price inflation in the form of increased maritime fuel prices is already hitting Asia.

These are not minor price fluctuations, these are price surges—and they are stark evidence that shipping costs are increasing rapidly. They are grim predictors that shipping costs will continue to increase over the near term at least.

Not Just Crude Oil

Other oil-related products are moving up in price as well. Sulfur prices, which had only partially retreated from their June highs, are heading back towards those highs.

Polyethylene, which had almost returned to pre-war price levels, has surged in July.

Styrene is showing similar price behaviors, having erased most of the recent declines.

Bitumen is also surging in price.

As I discussed early on in the war, these commodities price surges greatly increase production costs around the world, and especially in China.

No More Buffer?

The situation is compounded by the risk that strategic reserve releases as a price buffer are at or near exhaustion. The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve has a statutory floor level of 252.4 million barrels, and at the current pace of releases it will reach that floor sooner rather than later.

Without strategic reserve releases, the price impacts of the oil supply shock catalyzed by the Strait of Hormuz being closed again will be magnified relative to what they have been. Strategic reserve releases have kept effect oil supply greater than what it would be otherwise, mitigating some of the inflationary pressures from the Strait’s closure.

Without strategic reserve releases, an extended closure of the Strait of Hormuz constitutes a fresh oil supply shock soon to hit global oil markets.

This could be the stagflation the world had seemingly avoided with the ceasefire. It certainly is not going to help keep prices down anywhere.

This is the real threat posed by ongoing war in the Persian Gulf—the potential for extended and extreme economic disruptions from a series of primary and secondary price and supply shocks arising from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The ramifications of these disruptions have not changed from before, and these dislocations are very much a world problem, not just an American one.

If war continues, Persian Gulf oil does not flow. Without Persian Gulf oil, energy prices surge as global energy supply falls. There is no alternative scenario, no other possible outcome.

“Oilpocalypse”

This is the “oilpocalypse”—major global economic disruption catalyzed by surging oil prices and a fresh global oil supply shock.

China’s manufacturing costs are sure to rise in several industries. With China’s economy already struggling, the stagflation potentials from an oil supply shock are significant for the Middle Kingdom.

Freight costs are sure to increase, as bunker fuel prices continue to move up.

Energy price inflation is already a certainty.

How much inflation will we see? As the war drags on, quite a bit. Oil prices are already close to the $100/bbl threshold. Short of an outbreak of peace in the Middle East, we will not see oil prices retreat dramatically. We will see them rise dramatically. We cannot rule out oil prices surpassing the peaks reached in April.

Energy price inflation is already happening. What remains to be seen is how far beyond energy inflation will spread.

The reality of supply shocks is that they are by definition an abrupt reduction in overall supply. In order for price equilibrium to be restored, demand has to be reduced accordingly.

There is not a second outcome available. Whether that demand destruction is achieved through regulatory and monetary mechanisms (e.g., central bank interest rate hikes) or simply through letting inflation run rampant, the end result must be the same: demand falls until equilibrium with supply is restored.

For the United States, that would mean a return to either the stagflation of the 1970s or the induced deep recession of 1981-1982 from Fed Chairman Paul Volcker’s extreme interest rate hikes. If this war drags on long enough, if Iran remains intransigent and hostile long enough, that is the economic outlook for the United States. If this war drags on long enough, if Iran remains intransigent and hostile long enough, that is the economic outlook for the entire world.

Can this outcome be avoided? Easily—assuming a ceasefire is arranged before long, and sustained for at least some time. Yet even a ceasefire only delays the inevitable if it does not lead to a lasting peace arrangement. A ceasefire reopens the Strait of Hormuz and eases global oil prices, but as we are seeing right now, when a ceasefire collapses the Strait closes and global oil prices surge anew. Another failed ceasefire would only delay global economic crisis. A permanent peace is needed to avoid it.

Will there be a new ceasefire? Mediators are certainly working to make one happen. Whether they succeed and whether a new ceasefire lasts are questions that are inherently unanswerable until a ceasefire actually happens. Global economic prospects hinge on their successes or failures in this regard.

Welcome to Oilpocalypse Maybe.

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For many years, I’ve called for a bold, swift, and decisive action to protect the integrity of America’s elections. Every American deserves to know that when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately in a system, and that is to make that system secure. One where cheating and interference are not just difficult, but virtually impossible.

Unfortunately, the system we have today falls catastrophically short of that standard. Tonight, I’m announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence, revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our Election infrastructure. This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes—and really exposes like levels never thought possible—to hacking, exploitation and foreign interference.

The declassified documents, which are available on the White House website, detail intelligence assessments, intelligence gathering, and FBI investigations in a wide range of efforts by multiple bad actors to undermine and subvert elections in the United States. However, none of the points discussed by President Trump were new.

If that sounds like a criticism of Donald Trump, consider this: Corporate media claims President Trump “exaggerates” the security problems. Corporate media claims President Trump “overstates” America’s level of exposure.

Corporate media does not say President Trump lied. Corporate media concedes the problems exist, but minimizes their severity and importance.

President Trump told us much that we already knew about US election, which is both the point and the problem: the issues surrounding our elections have been known for a long time, and yet they are still not resolved. Fixes have still not been put in place.

Even corporate media does not dispute this, even as they try to minimize it because Trump.

Our election systems are broken, and the people who could fix them haven’t—and won’t.

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Corporate Media Wants To Ignore The President But Can’t

Even before President Trump’s address, corporate media made clear their intentions to undermine and discredit his allegations, starting by refusing to air the speech, citing concerns about airing “false information”.

The big picture: The address, which is expected to center around election security, put ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX between a rock and a hard place: air potentially false information about the 2020 election, or risk backlash from the White House and a confrontational Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

As I stated yesterday, this “concern” of theirs is pure hogwash and horse hockey. Axios simply lied that there was any actual dilemma, ethical or otherwise, challenging the media.

There is no rock and there is no hard place. That is pure fiction.

When the President of the United States speaks, it’s news.

If he lies (think Bill Clinton “I did not have sex with that woman…Ms. Lewinsky”), it’s news.

If he calls Democrats out for being anti-American, it’s news.

If he calls out John Roberts for writing an unconstitutional and legally void ruling in Trump v Barbara, it’s news.

That corporate media refused to air the speech was a blatant admission that corporate media did not want people to watch the speech and hear what Donald Trump had to say.

Ask yourself why that is.

Ironically, despite wanting people to ignore President Trump, corporate media could not and still cannot ignore President Trump. During and after the speech corporate media was “debunking” and “fact-checking” Trump’s claims.

The New York Times sought to rebut Trump’s accusations about China simply by saying China denied them:

China rejected President Trump claims, and said it “has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the U.S.” The outcome of elections “is determined by the votes of the American people,” Liu Chang, a spokeman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said in a statement.

Denials, of course, are not evidence and they are not rebuttals. That the New York Times would consider a denial by China as sufficient response to the accusation says more about the Gray Lady than Donald Trump, none of it very good.

USA Today similarly tried to downplay the China angle—but had to concede that there was substance to it.

In March 2021, Avril Haines, director of national intelligence in the Biden administration, released a report that said the intelligence community had “high confidence” that China did not try to interfere with the 2020 U.S. election but considered ‒ though never deployed ‒ an attempt to change the outcome of the election.

In the end, China did not view either a Biden or Trump win as being advantageous enough to risk getting caught, according to the council’s March 2021 report on foreign threats in the election.

The National Intelligence Officer for Cyber expressed a “minority view,” detailed in the same report, that China took some steps to undermine Trump’s reelection chances, primarily through social media and public statements.

Ironically, after President Trump was first elected in 2016, Russia allegedly performing the same actions as China were seen by the US intelligence community and corporate media as damning evidence of election interference by Russia.

If Russia’s actions were unacceptable election interference in 2016, China’s actions were unacceptable election interference in 2020.

The Biden Administration Acknowledged China’s Meddling

What corporate media conveniently overlooks is that China’s harvesting of election-related information and use of influence operations was conceded by the same intelligence community that claimed China did not actually “meddle” in US elections.

China probably also continued longstanding efforts to gather information on US voters and public opinion; political parties, candidates and their staffs; and senior government officials. We assess Beijing probably sought to use this information to predict electoral outcomes and to inform its efforts to influence US policy toward China under either election outcome, as it has during all election cycles since at least 2008 and considers an acceptable tool of statecraft.

The question has never been “is China meddling?” All sides agree that China is meddling. The question is how seriously do people take that meddling, and what do they propose to do about it?

Corporate media and the Democrats make it plain they do not take China’s meddling seriously and do not propose America do anything about it.

Ask yourself why that is.

Bear in mind that during the 2024 election cycle, Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center identified Chinese efforts to undermine the election campaigns of multiple Republican Congressional candidates.

While Chinese influence operations have sought to denigrate the American political process broadly, they have focused less on this year’s presidential race and more on down-ballot races, presumably in hopes of blunting anti-Chinese sentiment in the House and Senate. The accounts also attacked Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who is not up for re-election this year, the report said.

Earlier in 2024, cyber-security firm CyberX reported having identified a large network of fake social media accounts run by China.

A senior intelligence source speaking to National Security News on the grounds of anonymity said: “This report clearly demonstrates that the Chinese government wants to use covert social media accounts to interfere with the US elections. One can only assume that the reasons behind this are that China wants the next administration to be damaging to the US but beneficial to its own interests.”

CyberCX noted that many of the accounts in the Green Cicada network appear to be dormant, so they are not activity posting content. The firm said that this suggests that they may be part of a “sleeping giant” ready to become more active as the U.S. election in November approaches.

The accounts in the network have been increasing their activity since around April 2024.

China has been intruding into US elections. That has been reported time and time again. Yet President Trump is criticized for reminding us of this?

Ask yourself why that is.

We Know There Were Voting Irregularities In 2020

Corporate media’s challenge in wanting to dismiss and deny President Trump’s claims is that it is already been established that there were major voting irregularities in 2020.

In Georgia, the Fulton County Elections Board admitted to mishandling hundreds of thousands of early votes.

The county says approximately 315,000 votes cast during early voting were certified without the required signatures on tabulator tapes from poll workers.

Those tapes are printed from ballot tabulator machines to verify that the number of voters is equal to the number of votes.

Allegations of vote fraud and numerous ballot irregularities have dogged Maricopa County, Arizona, since the 2020 election, and the FBI launched an investigation into 2020 voting procedures there earlier this year.

As for the security and integrity of Dominion voting machines, that the systems have significant software flaws has been known by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for years. In 2022 the agency again admitted the flaws were real but insisted no one had take advantage of them:

“While these vulnerabilities present risks that should be promptly mitigated, CISA has no evidence that these vulnerabilities have been exploited in any elections,” reads the draft CISA advisory, which the agency shared in a briefing with state and local officials on Friday.

As a matter of basic logic, however, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It is also not the point, nor should it be. Where there are security flaws in anything, there is real danger those flaws will be exploited.

Yet somehow because some claim there is “no evidence” those flaws were exploited, the security concerns they raise are not a big deal.

Personally, I consider potential fraud a very big deal.

Election fraud is real. It is real enough that the Heritage Foundation maintains an online database of proven cases of election and ballot fraud.

Why Not Pass The Save America Act?

President Trump concluded his brief address with a demand that Congress get off its collective hindquarters and pass the Save America Act.

But most importantly, addressing this crisis of election security demands that Congress must pass the Save America Act. How easy is that to do unless you want to cheat? The only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get away or can’t get elected any other way.

Democrats, of course, have dug in their heels about passing this or any election reform legislation.

Is Donald Trump wrong about the Democrats’ motives? Consider what Democratic Senator Elise Slotkin of Michigan said of the Save America Act: it would make it hard for Democrats to win.

During a June 6 address to Indiana’s state Democratic Party, Slotkin celebrated the Senate’s rejection of the SAVE America Act, in which she claimed the bill would allow the Trump administration to “rig our democracy.”

“It would be hard for any Democrat in any state to win any election,” Slotkin said of the SAVE America Act.

Voter integrity and voter identification legislation would put Democrats at a permanent disadvantage. That is what Democrats are saying.

Ask yourself why that is.

This is why I say the real takeaway from President Trump’s speech is that he didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.

We know China—and other countries—do their damnedest to interfere in our elections. We have known this for years.

We know voting irregularities occurred in 2020. We have known this for years.

We know Dominion voting machines have serious security flaws. We have known this for years.

We know our election systems are broken. We know there are serious and substantial reasons for people not to trust our election systems.

We even know what to do about it.

The only thing we don’t know is whether or not we will do anything about it. On that score I have my hopes—but I also have my doubts.

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Good evening.

Before we begin, I’m proud to report that our country is safer, stronger, and far wealthier than it has ever been before. We are doing great.

Less than two years ago, we inherited an economic and social disaster. After the worst inflation in 48 years, the wide-open borders with millions and millions of people pouring in from all over the world, including criminals of all types. 11,888 murderers, many of whom killed more than one person. We had transgender for everybody, men in women’s sports, crime ravaging our cities, and the whole world was laughing at us as a nation, but not anymore.

Two years ago, our country was dead. Now, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. America is respected like we have never been respected before. We have more money being invested in the United States than at any time in the history of our country. More Americans are working today than ever before.

This week, it was announced that inflation saw the largest monthly decline in more than six years. It just happened. It was just given out. The media reported it. We accept it the best in six years.

The tax cuts in our great, big, beautiful bill are saving hardworking families thousands and thousands of dollars. Like with the provisions, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors, along with the interest deduction on a loan used to purchase a car. But only if that car is made in America, And a 100% expensing for our job-creating businesses.

Our stock markets are at their highest point in many years, but we can actually say of all time. And your 401ks, pensions, and retirement accounts are setting records every single day, the highest in history.

For years, we paid the highest price for prescription drugs anywhere in the world. Now we pay the lowest price under my most favored nation’s policy because I was able to get the rest of the world and the pharmaceutical companies to act responsibly. Drug prices are coming down by 70, 80, and 90 percent. TrumpRx.gov, this will ultimately reduce the cost of health care. You have to go to TrumpRx.gov and take advantage of it. But the cost of healthcare is coming way down because of what we’ve done with prescription drugs.

And with Trump accounts, every child in America now has access to a tax-free investment account to save for their future. Billions and billions of dollars are being invested, put in by companies and individuals to take care of our children so that at age 18, they will have potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in their account. And they’ll get off to a great start in life. So for that, go to trumpaccounts.gov and sign up your child or any child you’d like to sign up.

Our previously wide open borders have been transformed into the most secure borders in the history of our country, with zero illegal aliens being admitted to the United States in the past 14 months. That is zero. Nobody thought it was possible. We had the worst border in the history of our country, and now we have the best. Crime is plummeting nationwide with the murder rate at its lowest level since 1900 or more than 125 years ago.

We’re making a record investment in our armed forces, and we have the strongest and most powerful military by far anywhere in the world. I built it during my first term, and unfortunately, we’re forced to use it now.

We won in Venezuela, which is now working with us to produce millions and millions of barrels of oil.

We are likewise winning big in Iran, and you will see the fruits of that labor very, very shortly.

America is back and doing really well, but we still have a major challenge that must be urgently addressed because no country could be great without fair and honest elections. You have to trust your country because if there can be no trust, there can be no greatness. And that’s very simple. No trust, no greatness.

For many years, I’ve called for a bold, swift, and decisive action to protect the integrity of America’s elections. Every American deserves to know that when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately in a system, and that is to make that system secure. One where cheating and interference are not just difficult, but virtually impossible.

Unfortunately, the system we have today falls catastrophically short of that standard. Tonight, I’m announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence, revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our Election infrastructure. This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes—and really exposes like levels never thought possible—to hacking, exploitation and foreign interference.

Just as disturbingly this vital information has for many years been covered up and hidden from you. The American people are beautiful, are great American people.

But that all changes right now.

The documents we will release starting tonight have been gathered by the White House Government Transparency Task Force, a great group of people, along with the staff of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, supported by our top intelligence agency chiefs who have all personally reviewed the findings. We are presenting this evening and fully confirmed their authenticity.

You can see these documents for yourself at whitehouse.gov1. That’s whitehouse.gov. Go check it out.

Our purpose in disclosing this information is not to weaken confidence in election, but to earn that confidence by confronting vulnerabilities and correcting them very, very quickly. And that’s what we’re doing.

The documents cover five major areas of concern.

First, they show that over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files. That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening.

This data loss presents an unprecedented election security nightmare. The intelligence even shows that China has assigned a data exploitation unit specifically to this new project.

Compounding the travesty, the second set of documents we are releasing Reveals that members of the Deep State—a very, very famous group of people, in many cases—in our intelligence agency worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling, covering it up from both the President and the American people like nobody thought was possible.

U.S. spy agencies began learning about the compromise of voter registration files in 2020, When they discovered that tens of millions of voter data—think of that, tens of millions of voters’ data in 18 states have been bought, stolen, or hacked by China.

Yet those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information secret and hidden. They did not disclose to me as president or to anyone else and to the best of our knowledge they did not inform Congress.

In fact, all they kept saying is this is the most secure election in the history of our country. A standard very pat line that was divvied out to say the cover up of this colossal security breach.

It’s even more disturbing in light of the additional information showing that China engaged in other election-related activities to undermine my first administration and our 2020 campaign. They did not want, and they just didn’t want it. They fought like hell not to have it. Donald Trump to win, and for good reason.

As the documents we are releasing show, CIA reporting explicitly stated, and I quote, In mid-2018, the Chinese Communist Party’s policy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the U.S. President in an effort to reduce the U.S. President’s votes and make him resign or prevent his reelection.

Isn’t that nice?

Also in mid-2018, China was working to influence the results of the U.S. midterm elections and later the results of the 2020 Presidential election itself.

Separately, in mid-2019, the Chinese government’s strategy against the United States was focused on undermining domestic confidence in the U.S. president. They wanted to just make you sound like your president wasn’t so hot, when actually your president has done a great job, and they did everything possible to do exactly that.

Going on, this document says, and this is by the CIA, The strategy included efforts to use Chinese contacts with big U.S. companies to influence U.S. business leaders to turn against the President of the United States of America. The Chinese government sought to identify U.S. journalists who had reported negatively on the U.S. President and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him, as many as they could, and they didn’t care what they said. The Chinese government wanted U.S. President to lose the next election.

And the reason they wanted me to lose is because they knew I was wise to them, charged them billions and billions of dollars worth of tariffs, and built the strongest military anywhere in the world. We have the strongest military anywhere in the world.

These are exact quotes from the CIA reporting. The name of the person doing the quote, is now under review, but it gets even worse.

Raw intelligence obtained by the FBI in 2020, yet buried by rogue bureaucrats, stated that China’s activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden. Documents show that during this period, dozens of significant CIA and NSA reports about China’s election targeting were kept out of the Presidential briefing. These were briefings I would get almost every day.

Everything was kept out that was of importance.

One email among intelligence analysts admitted that they had, quote, deliberately massaged the presidential daily briefing to withhold information regarding Chinese activities related to the election. Another official inside the FBI Wrote that she was running, quote, “a shadow government”,unquote, to keep intelligence about China’s election meddling from becoming known and to keep it away from the honorable press.

Other officials who witnessed such efforts perceived the motivations to be blatantly political. Recently, we found significant numbers of burn bags in formation, and this is a group of bags that were used to destroy Information given by President Barack Hussein Obama to be burned. It was supposed to be burned.

These bags were supposed to be at a different level by different people incinerated and checked, but it never happened. Maybe we got lucky. We believe this was not done on purpose, but rather through gross incompetence of the people that were supposed to burn the bags.

But the findings are stunning.

Today, I’m asking the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA to investigate how and why such crucial information was hidden, to fire those involved in the cover-up, and to file criminal charges, if appropriate, against these people.

Yet, concealing China’s meddling was only the beginning. The third set of documents we are releasing proves that for many years Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems, dishonest almost all. They’re vulnerable and they’re easily compromised and people within our government knew that.

Tonight we’re publishing a series of previously classified U.S. intelligence community assessments and other reports proving that our government has long known these machines are extremely exposed to attack. As one assessment states, we judge that the United States’ adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, as well as non-state groups, have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.

That’s unquote, but that’s some statement, isn’t it? Made by supposedly great patriots of our country.

The document goes on to further state that, quote, we assess That centralized election related data repositories such as voter registration databases, poll books and other official election websites are most vulnerable to exploitation and adversaries could use this access to these systems to disrupt election processes within the United States of America.

Tonight we’re releasing all of those findings and spanning from January 2020 to June 2026, this is a cyber threat aimed at the very heart of our democracy.

Many people have questioned whether it could actually be possible to electronically manipulate vote totals or change election results on these terrible machines.

Today we are releasing documents that show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela.

And that’s exactly what happened, conspiring to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020. And that’s what they did.

This reporting included precise details about methods to regime develop to digitally alter vote totals in ways that could not Be detected even with an audit no matter how deep they went.

This intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our own system can never ever be hacked or compromised like it was in the past.

The fourth set of documents reveals that even when significant evidence of fraud has been detected, it has been buried and covered up. Among the disclosures tonight are FBI files detailing evidence of alleged fraud by a large-scale voter registration operation in Michigan.

In 2020, Michigan State Police raided a Democrat Get Out the Vote organization corrupt group in Muskegon. And were so concerned by what they found. They were just so concerned, they couldn’t believe it, actually, that they contacted the FBI in Detroit.

The documents state that some canvassers admitted to FBI agents that they signed voter registration forms and other people’s names, submitted fraudulent registration for people who did not exist, and received gift cards tied to their number of applications that they produced. In other words, it was pay, play, and cheat.

The FBI agents working on the case believe that crimes were committed, yet the Biden Department of Justice slow walked the investigation and killed it. Tonight,

I’m asking the FBI Director to ensure that the matter is fully investigated and to work with the Department of Justice to prosecute those responsible

for any crimes.

Finally, to reveal just how vulnerable our elections continue to be, We are releasing the results of a stunning investigation by the Department of Homeland Security.

According to the DHS review, state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections. Since Democrat states refuse to share their voter files, the real number is actually much higher than that. Even this limited analysis found more than a quarter of a million foreigners illegally registered to vote.

Put together, these disclosures reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it. It is not defensible. Hundreds of millions of U.S. voter files are in the hands of foreign governments. Our machines and ballot counting systems are exposed to hacking and manipulation and corruption.

China and other countries have been trying to meddle in our elections. Evidence of fraud has been buried. Hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls. And yet we still have elections with no voter ID, no proof of citizenship, and tens of millions of ballots floating aimlessly through the mail.

As one example of the insanity, California’s recent election for mayor of LA and governor was held on June 2nd, long time ago, but it was just completed a few days ago on July 10th. Think of that much more than one month. Took a month to count the votes. I wonder what they were doing.

This is worse than any third world country. There’s no third world country that has elections like we have.

In a rare move, NBC and ABC Fake News have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about because of the fact that they don’t like the topic, because they know how corrupt our system is and they don’t want to reveal it. They and others in the media are part of a plot. They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left.

They can’t have a Great country, and that’s true. You can’t have a great country without free and fair elections.

Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses. They use our public multi-billion dollar in value airways for absolutely no money. They pay nothing. All we want is honesty in our elections and honesty in reporting. They pay nothing for multi-billion dollar assets.

Great damage has been done to our country. Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue.

Every American, whether you’re a Republican, Democrat, independent, or otherwise, should be able to agree that we deserve the most secure, honest, and fair election system anywhere in the world. Secure elections should be a partisan, really, should just, we should be together. Democrats, Republicans, independents, everybody. And it should not be a partisan issue. It should cause to unite us, not to divide us. This should be a cause.

We should be united, not divided.

In light of the brand new and irrefutable information I have revealed tonight, my administration is in the process of notifying the states whose election data was compromised by the People’s Republic of China and many others. We will be working closely to mitigate any harm, and we’re taking swift action to ensure that sensitive voter data is better protected so we can never be bought, we can never be hacked, and we can never watch a stolen election again.

Tomorrow, the Secretary of Homeland Security will hold a briefing to outline his department’s recent work confirming cyber vulnerabilities in our electronic voting systems, they are bad.

We’re in the process of informing governors, senators, and members of Congress of potential issues in their states. If you look at voting today, it’s in such bad shape in so many states, and we are committing to fix it.

And we’re also committing to be working with those states and local jurisdictions to help them fix and patch known technical vulnerabilities before the midterm elections. We have very important elections coming up. We want those elections, to be honest. I’ve also ordered DHS to notify every state about noncitizens on their voter rolls and direct them to remove all ineligible voters from the lists immediately.

But most importantly, addressing this crisis of election security demands that Congress must pass the Save America Act. How easy is that to do unless you want to cheat? The only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get away or can’t get elected any other way.

This landmark bill requires that all voters must show photo voter ID. How simple is that? Could I have your photo, please? Photo voter ID. All voters must provide proof of citizenship. Are you a citizen of our country, please?

And hopefully there will be no corrupt mail-in ballots, which if you watched California and so many other places, mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt.

So you would have no mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military deployment, or travel. If you’re going away on business or vacation.

These reforms are urgently needed to stop the vulnerabilities that I’ve mentioned. To all Americans, I ask you to pick up your phone tomorrow, call your representatives in the House and Senate, and demand that they pass the Save America Act without delay. Together, we will restore faith and confidence in our country, and we will be bigger, better, and stronger than ever before.

Thank you. God bless you. God bless our great military. And God bless America.

Thank you very much.

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The Producer Price Index for final demand fell 0.3 percent in June, seasonally adjusted, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Final demand prices advanced 0.6 percent in May and 1.1 percent in April. (See table A.) On an unadjusted basis, the index for final demand increased 5.5 percent for the 12 months ended in June.

After the broad price declines from the June CPI report, there is less surprise that the PPI print shows something similar. What is surprising, however, is that, unlike headline consumer price inflation, which had been cooling over the past couple of months after an initial spike in March, headline producer price inflation had not cooled.

In May PPI was running hot. In June PPI was running cold.

What should we make of this very large swing in producer prices?

Is this another signal that the mini-stagflation scenario of the past few months has ended even before it could get seriously underway?

Is this a signal that more deflation has yet to come? Possibly. If that is the case the collapse in price supports across the board could mean that a longer term deflationary trend has taken hold, and the United States is heading into another “lost decade” of minimal or no economic growth.

What is the Producer Price Index trying to tell us? That is an excellent question—lets peel back the layers of data to see if we can construct an excellent answer.

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PPI Is Telling Us Prices Are Still Falling—Sort Of

Recognizing that the Producer Price Index broadly serves as a leading indicator for the Consumer Price Index, the most obvious signal we can see in the PPI data is that prices are still falling—sort of.

As the BLS press release noted, headline producer prices dropped 0.3% month on month in June.

However, core producer price inflation went up month on month, from 0.09% to 0.2%

Pulling back to look at producer price inflation year on year, the headline index eased to 5.5%, but core inflation rose from 4.6% to 4.7%.

Unlike consumer prices, producer prices did not fall across the board in June. Some goods and services are still seeing rising producer prices.

The headline PPI index suggests that we will not see significant inflationary pressure in the headline consumer price inflation data for at least the next month or so. With the core CPI print remaining constant year on year and the core PPI print moving up by 0.1pp, we may see some incremental increases in some core prices, even as prices overall trend down.

Energy Price Inflation Is Correcting Itself

In a repeat of the CPI data, the Producer Price Index for Energy dropped month on month by a fairly substantial 6.4%.

With oil prices having dropped throughout the month of June, this really should be no surprise at all.

Although the ceasefire with Iran is now over, declaring that ceasefire and reopening the Strait of Hormuz has proven hugely beneficial to energy prices in the near term.

If we go by just the data, the Producer Price Index for Energy is telling us that energy prices are still correcting, which would indicate we will see further energy price deflation in July within the CPI. However, we must buffer that thought with the reality that the price of oil is rising again, which will curtail whatever further price deflation the PPI appears to forecast for energy products.

We may see some further energy price deflation in July, but with oil having risen over $12/bbl for West Texas Intermediate, we should expect energy price inflation to return.

Food Prices Should Remain Stable

For food prices, the PPI report is quite at odds with the CPI report.

While the CPI data shows food price inflation heating up somewhat in June, the PPI data shows food prices in outright deflation, month on month.

This may be a stabilizing signal. If food prices are rising now, but are on track to fall again next month, overall food prices are neither trending up nor down.

We could be seeing the same balancing act in other subindices. PPI for Goods, for example, saw producer price inflation heating up in April and May, only to drop significantly in March.

Services, on the other hand, actually rebounded into producer price inflation for June, after printing deflation in May.

Considering that core producer price inflation rose slightly in June, we may very well be seeing indications that core consumer price inflation will be moving up over the summer, even as energy prices continue to fall. What we are not seeing are signs of nascent hyperinflation.

Intermediate Demand Is Cause For Concern

As a general rule, we tend to look at lower prices with a fair bit of enthusiasm. That is natural economic behavior—we always prefer to pay less.

However, there are times when a price drop is a warning sign. The abrupt shift into deflation within the Producer Price Index for Intermediate Demand is one of those times.

Intermediate demand had been heating up since last fall—well before Operation Epic Fury and the war with Iran. Across the entire supply chain, for intermediate demand stages 1 through 4, in June rising prices were abruptly replaced with falling prices.

Is the drop in intermediate demand prices an outlier rather than a trend reversal? We won’t know that until we see next month’s data. As these shifts are month on month, we could easily be looking at a series of one-off price decreases.

We could also be looking at a signal of a slowing economy. If deflation continues within Intermediate Demand prices, we will definitely be looking at a slowing economy. Regardless of what prices do, the outcomes we do not want to see is a slowing economy or a recession.

Intermediate Demand prices suddenly losing altitude may be a recession warning, making the June drop a reason to be concerned.

War With Iran Still The Principal Factor

What seems certain is that the war with Iran, along with its potential for disrupting Persian Gulf oil flows, is going to have an outsized impact on prices for the next few months.

One reason is the uneven and somewhat problematic nature of traffic volumes through the Strait of Hormuz.

While President Trump insists the strategic waterway is open, and without tolls, traffic levels suggest the rest of the world is not entirely assured of the Strait’s safety. As the chairman of the Japan Foreign Trade Council Masahiro Okafuji said bluntly during a press conference, the Strait of Hormuz is “dangerous”.

There is an equally blunt rejoinder, however: the Strait may be dangerous, but avoiding it is costly.

Renewed re-routing of the shipping lanes around the Cape of Good Hope on Africa’s southern tip would hike transportation costs by over 30%, according to Okafuji, who is also chief executive at major Japanese trading house Itochu Corporation.

Following the re-escalation in regional hostilities in recent days, the Joint Maritime Information Center (JMIC) reaffirmed on Tuesday its regional threat level for the Strait of Hormuz at “severe”, which it had raised last week after the first signs emerged of the collapse of the U.S.-Iran ceasefire.

If the world’s freight carriers are doing all they can to avoid sending cargo vessels anywhere near the Persian Gulf, shipping costs are going to be rising for at least the next month or so.

If there should be another ceasefire, so that sailing through the Strait does not seem all that dangerous, we should see traffic levels through the Strait rebound again.

Even with another ceasefire, however, we are not likely to see traffic in the Strait return to the status quo ante right away. After the Memorandum of Understanding was signed, some ships began transiting the Strait once more, but the levels were not at all what they had been before the war with Iran. Signing a new MoU will not make ships any more eager to transit the Strait.

The economic reality is that the uncertainties of the war with Iran are equally uncertainties about prices and the global economy. As we cannot say with certainty how much longer the war with Iran will continue, we cannot say with certainty what is to become of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. We cannot say with certainty if oil prices will trend back towards $100/bbl. We cannot say if Persian Gulf states will be able to reopen their oil fields or if production will have to be shut in.

If we cannot say with certainty what is likely to happen to fully one-fifth of the world’s oil supply, we cannot say with certainty what needs to happen with oil prices, as well as fuel prices and the prices of other refined petroleum products.

Last month’s ceasefire brought oil prices down by a very wide margin very abruptly. That lack of inflationary pressure has produced at least one month where prices drop because the anticipated supports for any given price or price level have moved lower.

However, the ceasefire is over. Iran is attacking other Persian Gulf states and the US is attacking Iran. The forces which brought oil prices down are already pushing them back up again.

What are we to make of the June Producer Price Index Summary? As with the Consumer Price Index Summary, the report is a one-off report of lower prices. Barring an outbreak of peace in the Middle East, we will not see a second drop in producer prices any time soon.

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Most prices fell last month. Those sectors not in outright deflation month on month showed significant disinflation.

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) decreased 0.4 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in June after rising 0.5 percent in May, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This decline in the all items index was the largest 1-month decrease since April 2020 when it fell 0.8 percent. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 3.5 percent before seasonal adjustment.

Headline inflation, core inflation, energy, and both durable and non-durable goods all printed deflation month on month in June. Last month was the month when literally all the prices fell.

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Wall Street Was Expecting Good News, But Not This Good

The drop in prices across the board was unexpected. Wall Street had projected 3.8% year on year headline inflation, and the Trading Economics Forecast had been 3.9%.

The CPI Summary printed headline inflation at 3.5% year on year.

Core inflation was anticipated to be 2.9% year on year, the same yearly inflation rate as in May.

The CPI Summary printed core inflation at 2.6% year on year.

Even the Cleveland Fed’s inflation nowcast had projected higher numbers than what was reported yesterday by the BLS.

Wall Street and corporate media “experts” were anticipating good news in the June inflation report, but they were not expecting the news to be this good.

Economists forecast that falling gas prices will turn the June Consumer Price Index negative, but that doesn’t mean the coast is clear for inflation just yet. Stripping out volatile food and energy prices should show inflation remains well above the Federal Reserve’s target on an annual basis, according to economists.

Still, economists say the good news is that inflation pressures have at least stabilized, and the surge of oil prices earlier in 2026 does not appear to have spread beyond the most energy-sensitive portions of the economy. The question is how other variables in the inflation picture may improve.

Naturally, the enthusiasm over unequivocal economic good news produced a bit of gaslighting as well—why confine oneself to facts when there is the opportunity for propaganda? The prospect of outright deflation in the CPI report led to a few exaggerated headlines:

In reality, the last time the CPI report printed outright deflation was in June of 2024.

Not even Common Core Math can squeeze six years in between then and now.

Wall Street expected good news, and Wall Street got even better news. That does not happen very often.

Deflation Month On Month, Disinflation Year On Year

Month on month, the headline price drop was a fairly substantial 0.4%—the largest decline in headline prices since the COVID Pandemic Panic in 2020, when prices fell 0.8% month on month

Core inflation mostly held steady, slipping a miniscule 0.02% month on month.

The month on month price decline also produced major disinflation year on year, with headline inflation printing at 3.5%.

Core inflation cooled to 2.6%.

The price drop very nearly erased all year on year inflation for the past three months. At 3.5% year on year inflation is above where it was in March of this year, but it is substantially below where the inflation numbers were just in April.

Energy Prices Way Down

While energy price deflation has been a recurring theme in the CPI report, June was the first month in quite a while when there was a significant decline in energy prices.

With a decline of 5.7% month on month, energy prices captured the largest month on month drop since the COVID Pandemic Panic.

As might be expected from such a large drop, virtually all energy price index components showed deflation for June.

Only piped natural gas showed any increase in prices.

The other volatile measure in headline inflation is food. Food was the one portion of consumer prices where the month on month inflation rate actually increased.

While food price inflation increased month on month in June, that rise did not even come close to offsetting the declines in energy prices.

Durable Goods Prices Continued To Drop

The only reason durable goods prices falling in June is not by itself a major news item is because durable goods have been dropping month on month since last fall.

Far more notable is that nondurable goods printed deflation month on month as well.

Even before prices started rising in March, nondurable goods prices had been trending higher. Yesterday’s CPI print was the first decline since January, and the largest decline since the COVID Pandemic Panic.

When we compare energy prices to nondurable goods prices, we can easily see why nondurable goods are down:

Energy prices have driven nearly all the recent change in nondurable goods prices. Energy has been driving nondurable goods prices up, and in June energy drove nondurable goods prices down.

Even services printed a sliver of deflation in June.

While nowhere near as large as the declines during the Pandemic Panic, that service prices dropped at all is noteworthy; service prices have been trending up in recent months.

The only part of core inflation which stayed positive for June was shelter price inflation.

However, at .13% month on month, housing prices printed the smallest month on month increase since October of 2022.

Even the forward-looking Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI) showed some cooling in June.

There was not a single segment of the CPI data set where there was not at least significant disinflation, with most segments printing outright deflation.

Stagflation Never Emerged

Perhaps most encouraging in the June price drop is that the energy price and supply shock from March never really translated into a stagflation crisis.

While energy prices rose dramatically beginning in March, that price rise never moved beyond energy prices. If we index the segments of the CPI data set to January of 2025, we quickly see that the surge in energy prices had little observable effect on other price segments.

Nor do we see the energy price surge showing any influence on other prices if we index from 2021 onward.

The deflation among durable goods is a trend extending as far back as January 2022. The general upward trends in food and service prices has not been impacted much if at all by energy prices. Only nondurable goods shows any influence from energy prices at all, but that is due to energy prices being also a subset of nondurable goods. Outside of energy prices, nondurable goods showed no inflationary trend.

While there is always a concern that a supply shock can produce significant consumer price inflation while also boosting unemployment, the classic toxic brew of stagflation that defined consumer price trends during the 1970s, that scenario simply never materialized.

Not Going To Last

There is no mystery why energy prices are in deflation for June: energy prices on the open market dropped in June, after their spring surge.

Fuel prices followed suit, with both diesel and gasoline prices at the pump heading south.

However, with the resumption of hostilities between the US and Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, oil prices have already begun to track upwards once again.

Gas prices quickly followed.

Energy prices fell in June, and that fall defined consumer price inflation patterns for the month. Energy prices have started rising since the end of June; that rise is sure to define consumer price inflation patterns for July.

The drop in prices for June is a welcome shift after the energy price surges of the past few months, but the one thing we already know is that it will not be repeated in July. There is no trend reversal in play for consumer prices, merely an abrupt and temporary cooling of consumer price inflation.

That the June inflation print won’t be repeated for July is perhaps the most encouraging part of the Consumer Price Index Summary. As bad as persistently high inflation is, and as economically damaging as it can be, persistent deflation is a far more severe problem, as it blocks all economic growth. Outside of durable goods, the US economy has not been seeing persistent price deflation. While there is room for debate about how much or how well the US economy is actually growing, one fundamental reality of the US economy is that it is growing—at a time when that cannot be said of other major economies such as China.

June was the month when all the prices fell in the US. It was the month when much of the energy price and supply shock that first hit the economy in March largely reversed.

July will not be a repeat of that price drop. July will also not be a repeat of March, even with energy prices moving up once more. We will see some further inflation increases at least for the summer months, but at present a new hyperinflation cycle such 2021-2022, or a 1970s-style stagflation crisis as was feared back in March, is not in the offing.

That outlook could change. Every factor that made stagflation a real possibility over the past few months is still present. Persian Gulf oil flows are still at risk of disruption. Strategic oil reserve releases are still at risk of not being able to buffer that disruption. The war with Iran shows no sign of ending quickly.

The June inflation report erased much of what could easily have become a severe stagflation crisis in the US. It did not erase the forces that would have caused that stagflation crisis.

The June inflation report was a one-time shot of good inflation news. Enjoy it while it lasts.

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How else shall we note the irony that Democrats and Republicans both have their Senate races roiled by someone named “Graham”?

The Democrats’ Graham is, of course, none other than Maine’s latest favorite son, Nazi, and accused rapist Graham Platner, who, after winning the Senate Democratic Primary with some 72% of the vote, was obliged to withdraw after the weight of sexual assault accusations became to great even for Democrats to ignore.

Platner, in keeping with the smarmy reputation he had acquired over his short political career, bowed out as put-upon victim of lies and power politics.

“What comes next needs to come from the people, needs to come from the people of Maine,” Platner said. “It needs to be open, transparent and democratic. It needs to be reflecting the will and the values of the people that built this movement.”

“We believe that for the movement to continue, it can’t be me. And for that reason, we are suspending campaign operations,” Platner continued. “We’re not doing it because of the allegations; we’re doing it because of the structures that are being taken away from us by those in power.”

The Republicans Graham is Lindsey Graham, the long-time Senator, war hawk, and reliable shill for the Military Industrial Complex from South Carolina who had recently won his state’s primary election and was preparing to seek a fifth term in the Senate when he abruptly came down with a sudden case of death.

Emergency personnel responded to a call for “cardiac arrest” at Graham’s Capitol Hill home on Saturday night, according to police scanner audio obtained by NBC News.

Photographs reviewed by NBC News show that paramedics carried a person on a stretcher from Graham’s home to an awaiting ambulance. Police cars and fire trucks were also on site.

Full disclosure: I have nothing good to say about either man.

As the general election phase of the mid-term election cycle begins to heat up, the fates which have befallen both Grahams leave Maine Democrats and South Carolina Republicans without a candidate, in an election year when Democrats sense GOP vulnerability and hope to capture both the Senate and the House.

Both Maine Democrats and South Carolina Republicans must now quickly replace their candidates. Tellingly, only the South Carolina Republicans are respecting voters in so doing.

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South Carolina: Special Election Required By Law

We must make one clear distinction between the Maine and South Carolina processes for replacing candidates prior to the general election: South Carolina’s process is more clearly governed by statute than Maine’s, and clearly calls for a special election1.

If a party nominee dies, becomes disqualified after his nomination, or resigns his candidacy for a legitimate nonpolitical reason as defined in Section 7-11-50 and was selected through a party primary election, the vacancy must be filled in a special primary election to be conducted as provided in this section. The filing period for this special primary election opens the second Tuesday after the death, disqualification, or approval of the resignation for one week. The special primary election then must be conducted on the second Tuesday immediately following the close of the filing period. A runoff, if necessary, must be held two weeks after the first primary. The nomination must be certified not less than two weeks before the date of the general election. If the nomination is certified two weeks or more before the date of the general election, that office is to be filled at the general election.

Based on Senator Graham’s death on Saturday, July 11, the filing period for the special election begins on July 21, and the special election held on August 11. If a runoff election is necessary, that will be held on August 25.

For South Carolina Republicans, the precision of the law is arguably a blessing. There can be no controversy about how to replace Lindsey Graham on the ballot. The GOP merely has to stick to the letter of the law.

The letter of the law says hold an election, and so South Carolina will hold an election.

For the remainder of 2026 and until the next Session of Congress commences next January 3, by law South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster will appoint someone to temporarily fill Graham’s Senate seat2.

In case of a vacancy in the office of United States Senator from death, resignation or otherwise, the Governor may fill the place by appointment which shall be for the period of time intervening between the date of such appointment and January third following the next succeeding general election. But in the event any such vacancy shall occur less than one hundred days prior to any general election, the appointment shall be for the period of time intervening between the date of such appointment and January third following the second general election next succeeding. The Governor shall within five days after any such appointment order an election to be held in connection with and at the time of the general election immediately preceding the expiration date of such appointment if at the expiration of such appointment an unexpired term shall remain.

The only guesswork in South Carolina is who will stand in the special primary election and who will take Lindsey Graham’s seat in the Senate for the remainder of this Session of Congress.

Maine: The Rule Is The Are No Rules

As much as South Carolina’s process is determined by law and thus lacks the Kabuki theatrics that are the hallmark of modern party politics, Maine’s process is by law designed to be more of a “Hunger Games” scenario defined mainly by the absence of specific process3.

1. Vacancy and replacement of nominees. The Secretary of State shall declare the vacancy as provided in section 362‑A and a political committee may make a replacement nomination for the general election only if a person nominated for an office at a primary election or by a political committee:

A. Withdraws on or before 5 p.m. of the 2nd Monday in July preceding the general election in accordance with section 367;

B. Withdraws because of a catastrophic illness, condition or injury that has permanently and continuously incapacitated the candidate and would prevent performance of the duties of the office sought, as long as the candidate or a member of the candidate’s immediate family files with the Secretary of State a certificate accompanying the withdrawal request that describes the illness, condition or injury and is signed by a licensed physician; or

C. Dies prior to the general election.

2. Deadline for replacement of nominee. A political committee may make a replacement nomination for the general election:

A. No later than 5 p.m. of the 4th Monday in July preceding the general election for a candidate who has withdrawn in accordance with subsection 1, paragraph A; or

B. As soon as practicable for a candidate who withdraws or is withdrawn in accordance with subsection 1, paragraph B or C.

In Maine, the main rule for how to select an alternative nominee is simply that there are no rules. The Maine Democratic Party has carte blanche to select a nominee however the party so chooses, provided it does so by July 27.

Presumably mindful of the “coup” fiasco from 2024, when Biden bowed out at the last minute and Kamala Harris was anointed as his successor, the Maine Democratic Party has made considerable noise about having a “transparent” process via a special nominating convention, according to Party Chairman Charlie Dingman:

The Maine Democratic party’s call to convention provides the most inclusive, representative, and transparent process possible under these unprecedented circumstances. Today, we are announcing that we will hold our nominating convention on Saturday, July 25, where 601 delegates, from each of Maine’s 16 counties, will vote to choose our new nominee. The convention will be fair, representative, and as transparent as possible as we all come together in service of our ultimate goal: defeat Susan Collins and win this Senate seat.

To that end the party has already put out the call for the convention, including a call for candidates to replace Graham Platner.

What the Maine Democratic Party has not done is put out a call for a special primary election.

We should note that Maine election law provides a much smaller window for replacing a candidate than South Carolina. Where South Carolina has very close to two months at this point, Maine affords the Democrats barely two weeks.

Still, it is instructive that Maine is not holding a special primary election, but rather a convention.

Is there legitimately enough time for a fair election to be held? Possibly not—and yet the logistics of organizing a convention are hardly less daunting, given the compressed time frame.

By the end of this week Maine Democrats are expected to meet in their respective counties to select delegates for the convention:

Maine Democrats across the state are coming together in a Special Nomination Process to select our next Democratic U.S. Senate nominee — and defeat Susan Collins in November. We have a short window to complete this process, with all steps concluding by July 27th at 5 PM. Here’s how it works:

1. Candidate Filing: Senate candidates will submit their intent to run and collect signatures to qualify for the ballot.

2. County Nominating Meetings (July 18–19): All 16 Maine counties will convene special nomination meetings where participants will vote to elect delegates. Maine Democrats can register to be a delegate and to participate and vote in their county’s meeting.

3. Nominating Convention (Saturday, July 25 at 9 AM at the Bangor Cross Insurance Center): 601 delegates will vote to select our new nominee.

We have worked hard to create a fair process that is inclusive of varying viewpoints and diverse backgrounds of Democrats across the state of Maine, as we all come together in service of our ultimate goal: defeat Susan Collins and win this Senate seat.

On Saturday (July 11) the MDP further clarified that the county nominating meetings will be announced this Wednesday (July 15).

In the space of a week, Maine Democrats are expected to choose delegates for a convention, and by the end of next week, said delegates will have selected (but not elected) Graham Platner’s replacement.

Is a convention process this rushed somehow more fair and more transparent than a special election?

Why is a convention preferable to a special election held on July 25? While elections in this country are traditionally held on a Tuesday, Maine election law merely requires special elections be published and conducted in as much the same manner as regular elections “as practicable”4. A Saturday election is perfectly permissible under Maine law, but don’t tell the Democrats that.

If there is time enough to announce a slew of county-level convention delgate “mini-elections”, how is there not time enough to announce a full special election by July 25, to give ample time for party bosses to stuff the ballot boxes count the votes ahead of the July 27 statutory deadline?

The Democrats, unlike the Republicans, had the option to choose how to deal with their ballot crisis, and chose not to involve voters.

Democrats Refuse To Address How Platner Became Their Nominee

There is one aspect of the Maine Democratic Party’s election dumpster fire that is an almost exact parallel to 2024: no recognition the party made a mistake even recruiting Platner.

The special nominating convention and all the nauseating political melodrama that has led up to it should not be happening, because Planter should never have been recruited in the first place.

Lindsey Graham put South Carolina Republicans on the spot purely by accident—dying in the middle of an election year has that effect. Platner not only chose to run for the Senate, he was also chosen to run for the Senate by Democratic Socialists of America political strategist Daniel Moraff.

That is a mistake so glaringly obvious even corporate media is scrambling for some semblance of moral high ground with a conveniently timed “Whisky Tango Foxtrot” pose. Last Thursday, CBS News’ Tony Dokoupil sought to excoriate the Democrats over the Platner affair, and in doing so said more than he realized.

Presumably, Platner’s currency was that he was “real people” rather than a groomed politician.

Many Democrats knew Platner had character issues. The theory, from Daniel Moraff, the political strategist who plucked Platner from obscurity, and made him into a star, was that the voters wouldn’t care. That they wanted, quote, “real people who have lived real lives.”

In other words, Graham Platner was recruited because he wasn’t Gavin Newsom.

What Dokoupil, corporate media, and the Democrats do not grasp is that a man’s character is revealed in the life he has lived. As Jesus teaches us in the Gospels, we may know a man by the fruit he bears in life.

Graham Platner’s “real life” was exactly what destroyed his campaign.

He claimed to be an oyster farmer—who sold oysters only to his mother.

His primary income was from claiming to be 100% disabled—even as he was “abled” enough to run for elective office.

He highlighted his military service—and insulted other veterans for their service.

He went above and beyond to earn the title “misogynist”.

Democrats defending Graham Platner loved to point out Donald Trump’s numerous character issues.

Yes, Donald Trump has a history and a reputation as a ladies’ man.

Yes, Donald Trump has a shoot from the lip verbal style and is frequently guilty of incontinent rhetoric.

Yes, Donald Trump is arguably a narcissist to at least some degree.

Donald Trump is also the builder who led New York City back from the brink in the 1970s.

Donald Trump built a legitimate real estate empire. He actually built things and put people to work.

Outside of politics, Donald Trump has done quite a lot with his life. We can see the fruits of his life just as we can see the fruits of Graham Platner’s.

The fruits of Donald Trump’s life propelled him into the Presidency. The fruits of Graham Platner’s life relegate him to irrelevance.

The Democrats are ideologically incapable of assessing the fruits of a man’s life. If there was any doubt about that before, Graham Platner is absolute proof of this. Remember, this is the party that inflicted Barack Obama and his “you didn’t build that” disparaging of individual effort on the country.

They certainly are no more likely to assess the life of whomever takes Platner’s place on the ballot than they did Platner’s life. The life of whomever replaces Graham Platner, and what they have made of their life, is no more likely to be a relevant factor at the nominating convention than it was when recruiting Platner. By the time it does become relevant to Democrats, it will once again be too late.

At most the Democrats are likely to want to avoid candidates with a history of assaulting women, but is there any good reason to believe they will consider character more deeply than that?

Equally left unaddressed is the reality that Democrat voters voted for Graham Platner in the primary. Platner’s failings as a human being and vulnerabilities as a candidate were known, yet he still managed to attract 154,058 votes—71.9% of the total—compared to the Establishmentarian alternative Janet Mills’ 41,301.

For all of Platner’s ugliness as a human being, he was the candidate elected by Maine Democrat voters to be their nominee, and the party bosses still opted to “unelect” him. Those same party bosses are opting to not elect his replacement, but to select them. Tammany Hall and the ghost of “Boss” Tweed have returned to haunt the Democrats yet again.

The Democrats are proving once again they are a party that fundamentally hates people. They despise the individual, and detest notions of individual effort, individual success, and individual achievement. They detest individual prosperity.

They detest individual votes cast by individual voters.

Their policies are always doomed to failure because their political beliefs are predicated on people always failing, never succeeding.

In that regard, Graham Platner is the perfect representation of all for which the Democratic Party stands. When Democrats look in the mirror today, Graham Platner is staring back at them.

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If the IRGC’s goal was to restart the war between Iran and the United States, it has arguably succeeded.

If the IRGC’s goal was to showcase American weakness, it has failed.

For the IRGC, the outcome of today’s tit-for-tat ceasefire violations can be summarized thus: FAFO.

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The day began with reports of an Iranian drone attack on the Al Rekayyat, a Qatari LNG carrier.

The Al Rekayyat was struck in the early hours of Tuesday, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue. An alert from security consultancy EOS Risk Group confirmed the attack about 8 nautical miles (15 kilometers) east of Limah, Oman, and a subsequent fire, classifying it as either a drone or missile strike.

That was one of a number of ships targeted by Iran, presumably for deviating from the shipping lanes Iran fatuously (and illegally) demand ships use when transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

The earlier strikes by Iran were on tankers that were allegedly trying to travel the strait by a route Iran has warned against, CBS News reported. While Iran did not claim the attacks, but state media said at least one ship ignored warnings.

Was Iran testing US resolve? Did the IRGC expect the Trump Administration would fold under the latest threats against shipping transiting the Strait of Hormuz?

If that was the case, the IRGC is almost certainly facing some disappointment tonight.

Response number one was the Treasury Department revoking Iran’s license (really sanctions waiver) to sell oil internationally, according to US officials.

“As President Trump and the administration have repeatedly affirmed, the MOU in effect with Iran is entirely performance-based,” the official said.

“Iran will only reap benefits if they exhibit good behavior,” they said. “Iran’s actions in the Strait were wholly unacceptable to the United States and will be met with consequences.”

Targeting civilian ships is hardly behavior one associates with wanting to sustain a ceasefire or reach a lasting peace deal. If anything, it signifies that Iran wants more conflict.

If Iran wants more conflict, US Central Command is ready to give Iran more conflict, according to CENTCOM’s social media postings on X:

U.S. Central Command forces have begun launching a series of powerful strikes against Iran to impose heavy costs for targeting and attacking commercial shipping crewed by innocent civilians in an international waterway. The U.S. strikes are in response to Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels that were transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s demonstrated aggression was unwarranted, dangerous, and a clear violation of the ceasefire.

Iranian state media has confirmed the strikes, most of which are concentrated around Iran’s coastline near the Strait. The port city of Sirik, Qeshm Island, as well as Bandar Abbas, were all reported being hit.

Iranian media reported explosions early Wednesday local time in the southern port city of Sirik, on Qeshm Island, and in Bandar Abbas. The reports said strikes hit a commercial pier in Sirik and fishing piers in both Sirik and Bandar Abbas.

A U.S. official told Reuters that strikes targeted Iranian air defense systems, coastal surveillance systems, surface-to-air missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles and drone launch sites.

The incidents were only the latest threat to the ceasefire agreement the U.S. and Iran struck last month, pausing the conflict that started in February with U.S. and Israeli strikes across the Islamic Republic. In a potentially major blow to that agreement, Washington moved on Tuesday to withdraw a key concession that had allowed Iran to sell oil on international markets.

Iran is back under oil sanctions. The US is attacking Iranian targets.

These are not events which suggest the ceasefire is at all still in effect.

Oil markets are coming to that same conclusion. The announcement of new US strikes in Iran caused a quick surge in the price of both Brent Crude and West Texas Intermediate this afternoon, for both September and October delivery.

All of this was easily predictable before the first drone struck the Al Rekayyat. Even if President Trump were desperate for any sort of deal with Iran, he has put out too much bluster with too much swagger to back down over three ships lawfully transiting a recognized international waterway.

Either the IRGC-dominated Khamenei regime believed President Trump would not dare respond for fear of a spike in gasoline prices with the mid-term elections right around the corner or the regime anticipated that Iran could absorb a likely “proportional” response to the tanker attacks. In either scenario, the Khamenei regime guessed wrong.

According to US officials, the latest series of strikes are meant to be “punishment, not proportional”. That characterization gained credibility when Iranian state media reported explosions on Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export terminal handling more than 90% of the country’s petroleum export loadings.

Whether the US considers the ceasefire still in effect or not is unclear, although CENTCOM has indicated that it has completed this round of air strikes.

Update:

President Trump has declared the ceasefire over.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s over,” Trump told reporters in Ankara before a NATO summit.

“I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum... they’re sick people, they’re led by sick people, and they’re vicious, violent people.”

Trump said he would allow US negotiators to continue talks if they wished but signaled he no longer believed diplomacy would succeed.

“They want to negotiate. They’re good people... but they have to come back to me,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them, they’re liars.”

Iran is back under sanctions. Iranian infrastructures near Bandar Abbas, Qeshm Island, and Kharg Island have been hit. How this outcome aids the IRGC is unclear.

If the Khamenei regime did not anticipate a response like this from the United States, it has not been paying attention at all to Donald Trump.

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There is no dispute to be had that Roberts’ ruling is contrary to the Constitution. There is thus no dispute to be had that Roberts ruling is void on its face.

When I say that Roberts’ ruling is void on its face I mean exactly that. Just as an act of Congress which violates the Constitution is automatically void, just as a Presidential order which violates the Constitution is automatically void, a Supreme Court ruling which violates the Constitution must also be automatically void.

This has to be true, or the Constitution is not the supreme law of the land.

John Roberts’ ruling on birthright citizenship is in every respect repugnant to the Constitution of the United States. By virtue of that same Constitution, John Roberts’ ruling must be regarded as null, void, and having no legal effect.

I am no radical for saying this. Quite the contrary, doctrines of nullification are no stranger to our nation’s political history. In the early days of the Republic, many understood them to be quite Constitutional.

Nullification is indeed Constitutional, and John Roberts going off the rails on the crazy train over birthright citizenship is merely the latest reason we need to bring that understanding back into our political discourse.

If the United States Constitution is to endure as a governing document, Roberts’ ruling must not stand. If the United States is to endure, Roberts’ ruling must be nullified.

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Legal Scholars Agree: Roberts Ruling Is Wrong

I am far from alone in treating Roberts’ arrant nonsense with contemnation.

In his dissent2, Justice Clarence Thomas repeatedly called Roberts’ out for his mis-statements and mischaracterizations of both the history and extant case law on birthright citizenship.

In his separate dissent3, Justice Samuel Alito called Roberts’ ruling “a serious mistake.”

NYU Law Professor Richard Epstein assessed Roberts’ ruling as “contrary to history.”

Claremont Institute Senior Fellow John Eastman panned Roberts’ ruling because it “answers the wrong question.”

I am quite clearly far from alone in being unimpressed by John Roberts’ 194 pages of jurisprudential slop.

Yet John Roberts wrote for the majority of the Supreme Court. His ruling is the Supreme Court’s ruling on the case. The Supreme Court has spoken, and has said in no uncertain terms that birthright citizenship is a Constitutional mandate.

Only the Supreme Court got it wrong. That is my conclusion, obviously. It is also Justice Thomas’ conclusion, Justice Alito’s conclusion, and the conclusion of a number of legal scholars as well.

At a minimum, a decent respect for our Constitution demands that we acknowledge the possibility (really the certainty) that the Supreme Court got it wrong.

The Court Is Not The Arbiter Of What Is Constitutional

In the modern understanding of Supreme Court rulings, the Court is charged with deciding what is and is not Constitutional.

As is so often the case with modern understandings of all things Constitution, this view is simply not true.

Nowhere in Article III of the Constitution will you find a grant of such plenary authority over the Constitution to the Supreme Court. Section 1 of Article III establishes that there will be Supreme Court, along with as many inferior courts as Congress deems necessary.

Section 2 defines the scope of federal court jursidiction:

The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;--to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;--to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;--to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party

Nowhere is the Court tasked with policing Constitutional construction.

How is it that the Court comes to rule which laws are unconstitutional? The answer to that is the process of “judicial review”, which was understood by the Founding Fathers to be inherently part of “the judicial Power.”

We know that to be the case because Alexander Hamilton, writing in Federalist 784, clearly articulated that the courts would declare all unconstitutional acts void in arguing the essential independence of the judiciary:

The complete independence of the courts of justice is peculiarly essential in a limited Constitution. By a limited Constitution, I understand one which contains certain specified exceptions to the legislative authority; such, for instance, as that it shall pass no bills of attainder, no ex-post-facto laws, and the like. Limitations of this kind can be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing.

However, even Hamilton was aware that it is possible for judges to get the law wrong, and for judges to impose their own ideas upon the law rather than merely interpreting the law. For Hamilton, this was yet a further reason for giving judges lifetime appointments, so as to put them beyond all political influences.

It can be of no weight to say that the courts, on the pretense of a repugnancy, may substitute their own pleasure to the constitutional intentions of the legislature. This might as well happen in the case of two contradictory statutes; or it might as well happen in every adjudication upon any single statute. The courts must declare the sense of the law; and if they should be disposed to exercise WILL instead of JUDGMENT, the consequence would equally be the substitution of their pleasure to that of the legislative body. The observation, if it prove any thing, would prove that there ought to be no judges distinct from that body.

If, then, the courts of justice are to be considered as the bulwarks of a limited Constitution against legislative encroachments, this consideration will afford a strong argument for the permanent tenure of judicial offices, since nothing will contribute so much as this to that independent spirit in the judges which must be essential to the faithful performance of so arduous a duty.

Yet even within this argument, we see an important distinction emerge: in Hamilton’s apprehension of the judiciary, the task of declaring a law unconstitutional is a task of acknowledgement. A law is unconstitutional because it runs contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution. A law which cannot be reconciled to the Constitution is from the very outset unconstitutional, and never enjoys any operative effect.

Chief Justice John Marshall would reiterate this understanding of judicial review in Marbury v Madison5:

It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases must, of necessity, expound and interpret the rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the Court must decide on the operation of each.

If courts are to regard the Constitution, and the Constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the legislature, the Constitution, and not such ordinary act, must govern the case to which they both apply.

As Marshall elucidated, the judicial Power is inherently one of interpretation. The role of the jurist is to adjudicate a body of facts in light of applicable law.

What both Hamilton and Marshall explicitly understood, however, is that interpreting the law was never an exercise of authority. At no point did Hamilton or Marshall ever construe the doctrines of judicial review to mean that the Supreme Court unilaterally or arbitrarily decided which laws were Constitutional and which laws were not. Rather, both men understood judicial review to be an exercise of identification, that if a particular statute could not be reconciled to the Constitution, the statute necessarily had to give way.

That the Constitution explicitly declares it is to be the supreme Law of the Land in Article VI confirms that this is how judicial review is meant to proceed.

What happens if a judge gets that law wrong?

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

As the poet Juvenal quipped rather pithily, “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”6—”who watches the watchers?”.

Alexander Hamilton, again writing in Federalist 78, was concerned with the courts watching the Congress. In part this was because he viewed the judiciary, being tasked solely with interpreting the law, as being the least dangerous branch of government.

Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them. The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.

In Hamilton’s view, the courts are always dependent on at least the Executive to implement whatever rulings they make. Without the cooperation of the other branches of government, the courts are powerless to convert their ruling into acts of governance.

Consequently, Hamilton never seriously addressed the possibility of the Supreme Court getting the law wrong. In his view, the inevitable tensions among the tripartite branches of the federal government were sufficient safeguard against judicial error.

Not every one of the Founding Fathers was so sanguine about the judicial Power. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison regarded the capacity to declare laws unconstitutional as being a competency of the several states. It was from this apprehension of Constitutional law that we get the Kentucky7 and Virginia8 Resolutions of 1798.

The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions were a response to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798—controversial laws restricting anti-government speech and the movements of foreign nationals within the United States passed in anticipation of war with France9. The state legislatures of both Kentucky and Virginia considered the laws to be an egregious and unconstitutional overreach by the federal government, and passed resolutions declaring the laws to be unconstitutional.

Thomas Jefferson, in his draft of the Kentucky Resolution, argued that, as the United States was a compact among the several states, and that no government could ever be the arbiter of its own actions, the several states were empowered to decide when the federal government had gone too far with its authority.

_Resolved_, That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes, -- delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force; that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.

James Madison, in authoring the Virginia Resolution, not only argued that the states were empowered to call Constitutional balls and strikes, but had an affirmative duty to do exactly that:

That this assembly most solemnly declares a warm attachment to the Union of the States, to maintain which it pledges all its powers; and that for this end, it is their duty to watch over and oppose every infraction of those principles which constitute the only basis of that Union, because a faithful observance of them, can alone secure it’s existence and the public happiness.

That this Assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the federal government, as resulting from the compact, to which the states are parties; as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting the compact; as no further valid that they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states who are parties thereto, have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them.

Both resolutions passed their respective legislative bodies, although the resolutions gained little traction with other states.

While Jefferson’s rhetoric was more explicit in articulating a nullfication doctrine, common to both resolutions was the same apprehension of laws in conflict with the Constitution articulated by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 78: A law which conflicted with the Constitution was from the outset operatively null and void.

As with the mechanics of judicial review, state nullification of unconstitutional federal law is not an arbitrary exercise of a state power, but an acknowledgement of a pre-existing conflict between a federal law and the United States Constitution, and that such conflict automatically renders the law null and void from the outset.

Chief Justice John Marshall would restate this same thesis in Marbury v Madison, in his conclusion that the Judiciary Act of 1789 was unconstitutional in its construction, and so denied William Marbury the means of redress he sought (and to which even John Marshall acknowledged he was entitled).

Certainly all those who have framed written Constitutions contemplate them as forming the fundamental and paramount law of the nation, and consequently the theory of every such government must be that an act of the Legislature repugnant to the Constitution is void.

While Marshall aligned with the Hamiltonian view of the judicial Power in Federalist 78 by acknowledging judicial review of laws as inherent to the judicial Power, he continued the sense of Constitutional construction articulated by Hamilton and restated by Jefferson and Madison that within the judicial Power, judicial review was a declaratory exercise rather than an authoritative one (what Hamilton would distinguish as an exercise of “judgement” rather than “will”). What renders a law unconstitutional is its conflict with the Constitution, not any decision either by a state or by the courts.

During the Nullification Crisis of 1832, a Constitutional crisis arising from the controversial Tariff of 1828 (known in the southern states especially as the “Tariff of Abominations”)10, South Carolina’s favorite son (and Andrew Jackson’s Vice President) John Calhoun would resurrect the concept of state nullification in his 1828 treatise "South Carolina Exposition and Protest.”11 While keeping the earlier apprehension of Constitutional construction that conflict with the Constitution invalidated legislation, Calhoun articulated a particular case where the judicial Power might prove inadequate in adjudicating such conflict:

The courts by their own decisions cannot look into the motives of legislators—they are obliged to take acts by their titles and professed objects, and if they be constitutional they cannot interpose their power, however grossly the acts may violate the constitution.

Calhoun’s proposition was that judicial review, while an acknowledged part of the judicial Power, did not invalidate state review. Calhoun argued specifically that the competency of a state to declare a law unconstitutional was of the same inferential nature as the competency of the courts.

It is objected in the first place, that the rights of the state, to interpose, rests on mere inference without any express provision in the constitution, and that it is not to be supposed if the constitution contemplated the exercise of a power of such high importance, that it would have been left to inference alone. In answer, the committee would ask those, who raise the objection, if the power of the Supreme Court to declare a law unconstitutional, is not among the very highest and most important, that can be exercised by any department of the government, and where they can find any express provision to justify its exercise? Like the power in question, it also rests on mere inference, but an inference so clear, that no express provision could render it more certain. The simple facts, that the Judges must decide according to Law, and that the Constitution is paramount to the Law, imposes a necessity on the Court to declare the latter void, whenever it comes into conflict with the former; so from the fact, that the sovereign power is divided, and that the states hold their portion in the same sovereign capacity with the general government, by like necessity, then is the right of judging of the infraction of their sovereignty, as well as of the remedy. The deduction in the one case is not clearer than the other; but if we refer to the nature of our constitution, the right of the state stands on stronger grounds than that of the court.

When the Court failed to identify an actual Constitutional conflict and appropriately declare the conflicting laws null and void, it fell to the states to take up that task and do what the Court either would not or could not do.

What this history demonstrates is that doctrines of nullification were mainstream political opinions at the founding of the Republic. Only later do we see a presumption that the Supreme Court is necessarily the final word in adjudicating a law’s constitutionality—a presumption for which there is zero basis within the text of the Constitution.

Who watches the Constitutional watchers? It is broadly understood that the Judiciary watches the Legislative and Executive Branches in this regard, but who watches the Judiciary?

The Supreme Court Can Be Wrong

What Calhoun stated bluntly is a reality we are seeing played out time and again in the modern era: The Supreme Court can be wrong about whether a law is Constitutional or no.

Even John Roberts concedes that the Supreme Court is sometimes wrong. He has little choice in this regard, as his judicial thesis in Trump v Barbara is predicated on the erroneous nature of the juridical monstrosity of Dred Scott v Sandford, which he aptly (and correctly) described as the Court overruling common law.

The Court had overruled the common law, but the people—eventually—would overrule the Court. It took more than a decade—and the addition of names such as Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chancellorsville to our national canon—but Douglass’s vision of “our common humanity” would be fulfilled.

Nor is Roberts alone in this. Justice Samuel Alito, in 2022’s Dobbs v Jackson12, took the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v Wade to the proverbial woodshed, describing its reasoning as “ranging from the constitutionally irrelevant…to the plainly incorrect.”

Even the Supreme Court does not defend Supreme Court rulings as inviolable and beyond dispute. The Court has gotten it wrong in the past, and, we must presume, will continue to get it wrong in the future.

The unquestioned reality of Supreme Court imperfection in this regard begs an obvious question: what should the nation do when the Court is in error?

A moment’s thought is all that is needed to realize that acquiescence to an erroneous Court decision is not a viable option. When the Court gets it wrong, what the nation dare not do is remain silent about that error. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia noted in his concurrence in United States v Irvine13, “qui tacet, consentire videtur” (“He who remains silent seems to consent”) is established common law doctrine; if we are silent about John Roberts’ juridical execrescence we are consenting to Roberts imposing his false view of the Constitution and its Fourteenth Amendment.

As silence is not an option in the face of judicial error, speaking out becomes essential civic duty. My calling John Roberts’ unconstitutional ruling unconstitutional, and necessarily null, void, and of no operative effect, is no more than must be done.

Declarations Are Necessary But Insufficient

By itself, my statement will achieve little if any practical effect. I am one man and my platform far too small to steer public opinion to any discernible degree. Me pointing out that the Roberts ruling, being in conflict with the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment and clearly unconstitutional, is necessarily null and void, is a necessary civic step but, on its own, woefully insufficient.

Yet the more people who do acknowledge that Roberts’ ruling is in violation of the Constitution, the more practical effect it can have. While likely still insufficient, the more who acknowledge that Roberts’ ruling is necessarily null and void, the better. Public opinion is very much a shaping force in public policy.

Several Republicans in Congress have already begun to push for a Constitutional Amendment to reverse Roberts’ unconstitutional ruling. Senator Rand Paul had even taken the pre-emptive step this past April of introducing just such an amendment, against the possibility of the Court ruling erroneously as it has. Building public opinion against Roberts’ unconstitutional view of birthright citizenship can only help strengthen such efforts. Given the Sisyphean task of getting any Constitutional Amendment through the Congress and completely ratified, such efforts need all the support they can get.

There are more controversial steps some can take which may prompt a quicker resolution. President Trump could take the unprecedented step of making a Presidential Proclamation stating that John Roberts’ ruling is unconstitutional and therefore void.

That has never been done before, which means we cannot predict with certainty how such a move would play out either among the electorate, within Congress, or before the Supreme Court.

What we can predict is that such a move would force every political actor in Washington to one side or the other. No Congressman, no Senator, no jurist would have the luxury of remaining neutral or silent. They would either have to declare for President Trump’s view of the matter, or John Roberts. Given that several members of both Houses of Congress have already expressed opposition to Roberts’ view of the Fourteenth Amendment, just the nature of politics in the information age will compel at least some of them to support Trump in such a maneuver. They might not like it, and most may not like Donald Trump, but it would be difficult to repudiate Trump without repudiating their own positions on birthright citizenship.

Similarly, state legislatures might reawaken and reassert state power by passing resolutions calling the Roberts ruling unconstitutional, null, and void. We have not seen this done since South Carolina’s Ordinance of Nullification in 183214, during the aforementioned Nullification Crisis.

A slew of states passing a similar resolution nullifying the Roberts ruling would produce a new nullification crisis, but would that not be the point? States calling out as erroneous a Supreme Court ruling would be in every respect a Constitutional crisis (neither the South Carolina Ordinance of Nullification nor the earlier Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions were ever adjudicated as to their Constitutionality), but surely it will take a Constitutional crisis to achieve a Constitutional correction.

One thing is certain: State resolutions nullifying Roberts’ ruling are not at all likely to trigger the emphatic pushback South Carolina received in 1832, when Andrew Jackson threatened to respond with military force if the state did not back down15. Under the circumstances, we could anticipate President Trump welcoming such state action, which would only further heighten Constitutional tensions.

If a Presidential Proclamation would catalyze a Constitutional crisis over birthright citizenship, state resolutions against the Roberts’ ruling are likely only slightly less explosive. That they would be highly controversial is perhaps the best argument for enacting them.

States Still Matter

There is a prevailing school of thought in American jurisprudence that diminishes the role of the states in the Constitutional system. While Jefferson and Madison viewed the Constitution as a compact among the several states, early Supreme Court decisions such as McCulloch v Maryland16 rejected that view, with Chief Justice Marshall arguing the Constitution is an expression of the will of the people.

From these conventions the Constitution derives its whole authority. The government proceeds directly from the people; is “ordained and established” in the name of the people, and is declared to be ordained, “in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and to their posterity.”

Justice Joseph Story, in Martin v Hunter’s Lessee17, similarly panned the role of the states in the formation of the Union.

The Constitution of the United States was ordained and established not by the States in their sovereign capacities, but emphatically, as the preamble of the Constitution declares, by “the people of the United States.” There can be no doubt that it was competent to the people to invest the general government with all the powers which they might deem proper and necessary, to extend or restrain these powers according to their own good pleasure, and to give them a paramount and supreme authority.

However, what this formulation overlooks is that state governments are themselves an expression of the same American people who ordained and established the Constitution of the United States.

We only have to review the preambles of state constitutions such as that of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts18.

We, therefore, the people of Massachusetts, acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the goodness of the great Legislator of the universe, in affording us, in the course of His providence, an opportunity, deliberately and peaceably, without fraud, violence or surprise, of entering into an original, explicit, and solemn compact with each other; and of forming a new constitution of civil government, for ourselves and posterity; and devoutly imploring His direction in so interesting a design, do agree upon, ordain and establish the following Declaration of Rights, and Frame of Government, as the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The presumption necessarily must be that, when a state government speaks, it is speaking on behalf of the people of that state, who are also people of the United States. If a state government takes the Supreme Court to task for a ruling, it is in effect saying “that is not the Constitutional compact our citizens have made.” If the people of a state wish to convey that message to the Court and to the country, it is fitting the state government stand as the messenger.

Earlier I said that, while Marshall was correct that the role of the courts is to say what the law is, it is not the role of the courts to say what the law is not. Permit me to elaborate further: The courts, through the judicial power, resolve to reconcile all government acts (particularly acts of the legislature) to the Constitution, declaring all irreconcilable acts unconstitutional. To say what the law is, the courts must necessarily eject from adjudication all such unconstitutional laws.

It is not the role of the courts to say whether a law pushes the compact among the people of the United States that is the operative agreement codified by the United States Constitution beyond the boundaries to which the people have agreed. The people necessarily retain that competency, and the Constitution even alludes to their retaining that competency through the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, reserving all unenumerated rights and powers to the people or the states, respectively.

If the courts, finding no irreconcilable conflict, declare a law constitutional which pushes the compact of We The People beyond boundaries acceptable to We The People, it is the right and duty of We The People to push back.

The several states are no less an expression of the will of the American people than is the government of the United States. “We The People” are the final authority within the several states just as we are within the United States. Our consent to be governed is as applicable to state government as it is to the national government. If a state challenges the national government, that is no more than the people of the state clarifying the terms of their continuation of the Constitutional compact that is the United States.

States still matter especially when Constitutional questions arise. State legislatures are still a vehicle for the people of the several states to make their wishes known.

State repudiation of the Roberts’ ruling would be substantive and absolutely could not be ignored. That alone makes state action appealing: state action will compel national reaction, which is exactly what is needed to correct the gross error of the Roberts ruling.

The Battle Cannot Be Avoided

While such obviously combative measures as Presidential Proclamations and state resolutions denouncing the Roberts ruling as an unconstitutional monstrosity are surely and reflexively unappealing to most people, they are in all probability unavoidable.

John Roberts setting aside the Constitution to impose his own views on birthright citizenship—to do the very thing Alexander Hamilton believed could not happen in an independent judiciary—is but the latest in a growing train of judicial abuses and usurpations.

Roberts himself has contributed before to this train, with his incomprehensible ruling on President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs earlier this year.

Late last month U.S. District Judge Denise Casper peremptorily overturned President Trump’s election security Executive Order. Surely “We The People” are entitled to have the utmost protections afforded to our elections, that we may have confidence in their outcome. Too often we have reason to suspect fraud and malfeasance, yet this one judge arrogated to herself the authority to dismiss all such concerns.

District Judge Paul Friedman has made the extraordinary ruling that the Pentagon is not allowed to mandate escort-only access policies within the Pentagon. Those running the nexus of this nation’s security are being told to allow journalists free run of the building, national security be damned.

Another District Judge, John McConnell, Jr., has told the US Citizenship and Immigration Service it must continue approving asylum claims, even as evidences of rampant abuses of such claims appear repeatedly even in the corporate media.

Nor can we overlook the execrable Judge James Boasberg, who has thumbed his judicial nose at President Trump so many times that at least one senator, Eric Schmitt of Missouri, has called for his impeachment.

The prospect of impeaching several federal judges who have seemed hell-bent on thwarting President Trump at every turn emerged very early last year. Even then, there was considerable evidence that several judges were (and are) exercising a most un-Hamiltonian “will” rather than the “judgement” which is their Constitutional obligation.

In the tariff case earlier this year, Justice Neil Gorsuch used his concurrence to take his colleagues on the Court to task for subjecting President Trump to a different judicial standard than President Biden19.

Unpack that last claim first. My concurring colleagues contend that, as a matter of “straight-up statutory construction,” IEEPA does not grant the President the power to impose tariffs. Post, at 7. In doing so, they make thoughtful points about the statute’s text and context. But their approach today is difficult to square with how they have interpreted other statutes. Dissenting in past major questions cases, they have argued that broad statutory language granting powers to executive officials should be read for all it is worth. Yet, now, when it comes to IEEPA’s similarly broad language granting powers to the President, they take a more constrained approach.

If the tariff case was decided on the basis of anti-Trump animus, as Justice Gorsuch clearly believes, can we be certain Trump v Barbara was not motivated by similar political considerations? No, we cannot.

“Because Trump” is a statement of politics, not a statement of law.

Yet “because Trump” has been an increasingly obvious factor in many judicial rulings. Many are ultimately overturned by the appellate courts, but that has not dissuaded judges from arbitrarily seeking to impose their own will on the law, and for no other reason than Donald Trump is a President they personally despise.

The courts, as envisioned by Alexander Hamilton and as championed by John Marshall, are meant to be wholly neutral adjudicators of facts in light of applicable law. The courts are entrusted with the task of calling Constitutional balls and strikes because they are presumed to be outside the political fray. Judges are given lifetime appointments specifically to place them outside the political fray.

The courts are demonstrably no longer outside the political fray. With this latest juridical aberration, John Roberts has shown once again that the Chief Justice of the United States is not outside the political fray.

As the courts are not outside the political fray, they are by definition not articulating what the law is, but what they believe the law should be. They are by definition not wholly neutral adjudicators of facts in light of applicable law. They are political entities pursuing political agendas.

When judges pursue political agendas from the bench, justice has left the courtroom entirely.

Political rulings by politicized justices must not be allowed to stand, because if they stand the Republic will fall. Some might say it is already falling—and they might be right.

If we do not nullify Roberts’ insane ruling on birthright citizenship, we might avoid Constitutional crisis for a while longer. We will not avoid it for much longer, however, because the growing roster of rogue judges making indefensible rulings will bring us to a Constitutional crisis by their perverse lawlessness no matter how much we try to avoid it.

We The People must nullify John Roberts’ unconstitutional ruling on birthright citizenship, for the sake of the very Constitution on which John Roberts has clearly turned his back.

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In defense of that statement, as well as the premise “that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” the signers of the Declaration pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

From the Declaration of Independence, and the years of warfare which followed, came the United States of America. We quite naturally celebrate the Declaration of Independence every July Fourth as the “birthday” of this most remarkable republic.

Some argue that this nation's founding is no cause for celebration. Some argue that ours is a nation founded on slavery and birthed in corruption. Some denounce Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the Founding Fathers for owning slaves, and argue we should disown them, rejecting them and all their works—including, apparently, the Declaration of Independence.

Have any of them considered what that alternative means?

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We should acknowledge one important truth straight away: our Founding Fathers were flawed and imperfect men to say the very least.

Thomas Jefferson not only owned slaves, he carried on an extended sexual liaison with his slave Sally Hemmings, a relationship that is charitably described as exploitative. In the modern era his conduct would almost certainly result in criminal charges, and could any of us honestly say such charges would not be warranted?

George Washington owned slaves as well. He was also quite the opportunist, and a social climber who had anger management issues. A good deal of his antipathy towards Great Britain almost certainly stems from being denied a commission in the regular British Army and the social status it would have conferred. There is no small irony that the leader of a rebellion premised on human equality longed to be numbered among the elites in an aristocratic society patterned on prevailing presumptions of human inequality.

John Adams did not own slaves, but he was intelligent and irritating in very nearly equal measure. He was blunt, frequently tactless, and notoriously prickly and thin-skinned. He was frequently impatient with his fellow delegates. He was often abrasive and obnoxious. To say his was not the temperament of a politician would be an understatement!

John Hancock made his fortune in colonial shipping. In other words, he was a smuggler who was quite successful at evading British taxes and customs duties. In the 1760s he was even charged with smuggling. He likely would have been convicted but for the lawyerly brilliance of none other than John Adams.

Ben Franklin was renowned in his day as a ladies man. His son William was born out of wedlock. Some modern moralists would denounce him as a womanizer and misogynist.

These are the historical realities of the men who authored the Declaration of Independence and then fought for the freedom they claimed as theirs.

Were our Founding Fathers “good men”? Again, modern moralists frequently argue that they were not, and that their negative traits warrant excising them from our historical memory, along with all their works.

We can honestly acknowledge the sins of the Founding Fathers. We can honestly acknowledge that Thomas Jefferson's conduct with Sally Hemmings was indefensible. We certainly should not pretend that our Founding Fathers were perfect when they so clearly were not.

Yet if we do as some would suggest and reject all these flawed and imperfect men did with their lives, where does that leave the Declaration of Independence and its pronouncements of human equality and human liberty?

If we reject the Declaration of Independence, including its statement that all men are created equal, are we also rejecting the premise that all men are created equal? If we cast out the Declaration of Independence, are we saying Man does not have inalienable rights?

Is that really an argument we want to make?

Some will argue that Thomas Jefferson especially was a hypocrite, that he did not actually believe what he wrote. Even if we assume that to be true for the sake of argument, does his lack of belief invalidate the premise that all men are created equal?

Do we conclude from Jefferson's presumed hypocrisy that men are not created equal?

Do we conclude from Jefferson's presumed hypocrisy that we do not possess the inalienable rights of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness“?

We do well to consider the world that would leave us.

Do we want to live in a world where all men are created equal, or do we desire a world with aristocratic inequality?

Do we want to live in a world where freedom is an inalienable right, or do we desire a world where freedom is given or taken at the whimsy of government?

Do we desire society in which rights and liberties come from the hand of God, or a society where rights and liberties are defined by the problematic generosity of government?

Do we desire a society which aspires to universal human equality, or a society where a person's worth is defined by the arbitrary accidents of birth?

The Founding Fathers were not saints, and we would do violence to their legacy to pretend that they were. Yet we would do greater violence to their legacy to pretend that their human failings somehow render the truth of the Declaration of Independence false.

We would do great violence to ourselves to take seriously the proposition that the Declaration of Independence, along with its declarations of human worth and human liberty, should be discarded simply because its authors were flawed and imperfect human beings.

We do well to remember we are all flawed and imperfect. Our Founding Fathers were certainly no better than we are, but it strains credulity to seriously suggest they were somehow worse.

We do not need to debate whether the premise that all men are created equal is true. All men are indisputably created equal.

We do not need to debate whether the premise that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights is true. All men are indisputably endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.

What we also cannot debate is that the Declaration of Independence was the first time human equality and the inalienable rights of men were proposed as the foundation for an actual government. The Declaration of Independence was never just a statement of political theory; it has always been a statement putting political theory into political practice.

Despite the flaws and failings of this nation’s Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence marks the first time these self-evident truths were put forward as the aspirational basis for human government. The Declaration of Independence stands as a powerful and historic declaration of what government should strive to be.

For 250 years, the Declaration of Independence has been this country’s highest aspiration, and our fondest hope.

Despite the flaws and failings of this nation’s Founding Fathers, the aspiration that is the Declaration of Independence warrants celebration, not just on the Fourth of July, but on every day throughout the year.

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The common thread in both jobs reports: Job growth slowed in June. ADP reported 98,000 jobs created, down from 122,000 jobs in May.

The BLS jobs report showed an even greater cooling of labor markets, with job growth slowing to 57,000.

Both total nonfarm payroll employment (+57,000) and the unemployment rate (4.2 percent) changed little in June, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment continued to trend up in professional and business services, social assistance, and health care. Leisure and hospitality lost jobs.

Both numbers were well below Wall Street as well as Trading Economics projections. Wall Street had anticipated ADP would report 113,000 jobs created in June.

Wall Street had similar expectations for the BLS jobs report at 110,000 jobs.

The job growth was there, just much less of it than was forecast.

Neither the ADP nor the BLS jobs reports are, on the surface, particularly bad jobs reports. Both reports are considerably cooler snapshots of US labor markets than we have seen in recent months.

While the headline numbers for both reports are not altogether bad numbers, when we delve into the details we quickly see that labor stumbled in June, with a number of sectors shedding jobs rather than adding them.

The June job reports are not altogether bad reports, but the strength of the overall jobs numbers cannot conceal the reality of continuing weaknesses within US labor markets.

We may not be backsliding into a jobs recession…yet. We are still very much at risk of a return to jobs recession, and without a lot of advance warning.

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May JOLTS Was Right About Downward Revisions

One the more significant cautionary notes found in the May JOLTS data was the warning signal that the Employment Situation Summary may be about to experience significant downward revisions.

That warning signal proved to be prescient, for the June ESS had major downward revisions for both April and May.

The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for April was revised down by 31,000, from +179,000 to +148,000, and the change for May was revised down by 43,000, from +172,000 to +129,000. With these revisions, employment in April and May combined is 74,000 lower than previously reported.

This abrupt elimination of 74,000 previously reported jobs erased last month’s achievement of year to date job revisions printing positive.

Total year to date revisions to the jobs data is now down 8,000 jobs.

The June jobs report gives us another warning signal as well: signs that Lou Costello Labor Math is still lurking within the overall data set, as the Employment Level from the Household Survey once again broke with from the All Employees metrics within the Establishment Survey.

Given that both the Household and Establishment Surveys are supposed to be measuring the same overall data—the American labor force—we should expect similar growth trends within both surveys. In June the Employment Level dipped again in a clear divergence from the All Employees trends.

When the two surveys are not reporting similar trends, we must be cautious about what to make of the data.

Sector Results Were Uneven

ADP’s Chief Economist Dr. Nela Richardson summed up the sector results for both the ADP and BLS data sets succinctly as a slowdown in job growth.

The pace of hiring is telling a story of both supply and demand. We know it’s taking people longer to find work, but there also are signs of labor supply constraints in certain industries. For now, the overall effect is a slowdown in job creation.

While the headline numbers were not bad—the ADP headline number would have been quite good were it not a climbdown from May’s much stronger figure—they obscure the weakness reemerging in several sectors. Several sectors lost jobs in June, according to the ESS.

ADP was more optimistic, although there is still a clear cooling trend in the data.

The BLS data for manufacturing was again one of the brighter spots in the ESS report. Although the downward revisions wiped out the past two months’ positive job numbers for the manufacturing sector, the June data still showed job growth for the sector.

ADP showed manufacturing job growth gaining steam in June.

The ESS print shows Leisure as the worst performing sector in June, shedding a shocking 61,000 jobs.

From the revised May figure of 40,000 jobs created, in June Leisure job growth suffered a 100,000-plus shift from job creation to job destruction.

ADP tells a different, more muted, job growth story for the Leisure sector, printing job growth of 2,000 jobs in June.

Leisure job growth cooled in June, but it did not go into the deep freeze reported on the ESS.

The ESS and ADP reports also differed in jobs numbers for Information as well as Financials Services. In June ESS printed 0 job growth for Finance and 9,000 jobs lost for Information. ADP reported 14,000 jobs for Finance and 9,000 for Information.

One sector were the ESS and ADP data largely agree is Mining, which the ADP report prints as losing 5,000 jobs, and the ESS printing job loss of 4,000.

Both the ESS and the ADP reports show Healthcare returning to its status as the dominant sector for job growth, with the ESS printing 69,000 jobs in June and ADP printing 48,000 jobs.

Where the reports differ on Healthcare is ADP shows the job growth cooling in recent months, while the ESS report shows Healthcare having something of a rebound in June.

Overall, while both jobs report show job growth cooling in June, the ESS data is the more pessimistic not only in showing less job growth, but also in a cooling trend from peak job growth in March. The ADP data shows stronger job growth as well as job growth at a peak in May before cooling in June.

The one aspect of job creation for the US where the reports are clearly in agreement is that job growth for June was more uneven than was reported in April or May—although with revisions the Employment Situation Summary is proving to have been more uneven than originally reported, to the surprise of exactly no one (at least, no one who follows my work!).

The ESS in particular has snatched part of the employment rug out from under everyone’s feet, taking back a substantial portion of the glowing job growth narrative of the past two months. We still have job growth, we still have manufacturing job growth, but we have quite a bit less than we have been told in both April and May.

Employment Level Declined Again

A major warning signal coming from the Employment Situation Summary is the decline in the overall Employment Level, which declined by some 507,000 individuals in June.

May apparently was a brief hiatus from a decline in overall employment from a December 2025 peak.

If we look at just the Employment Level data from the ESS’ Household Survey, we would see employment declining throughout 2026 to date, with only last month showing any respite from the contraction in the employed labor force.

The Employment-Population Ratio shows a much longer-term decline, beginning back at the end of 2023.

For all the reports of job growth in the ESS’ Establishment Survey data, the Household Survey continues to tell a tale of fewer and fewer people working over time, and a smaller segment of the population.

The Establishment Survey data might spin an optimistic narrative of job growth and jobs recovery within the US economy, but the Household Survey is challenging the jobs recovery narrative.

Declining Joblessness?

Despite the grim outlook on the nation’s overall employment level, unemployment actually dropped in June, in both the official and “real” unemployment rate metrics.

Both gauges of unemployment fell by approximately a tenth of a percentage point. The official unemployment rate fell from 4.3% to 4.2% in June. The real unemployment rate, still higher as I include with the unemployed people those not in the labor force but who want a job now in calculating that percentage, dropped a little bit more, from 7.61% to 7.45%.

Looking at the reported numbers of unemployed individuals, official unemployment for June declined in this country by 213,000 people.

Even the number of people not in the labor force but who want a job now dropped in June by 142,000.

Paradoxically, even as the Household Survey shows fewer people working, it also shows fewer people not working but still looking for work.

However, while the cohorts of people not working but looking for work declined, the overall number of people not in the labor force rose in June, surging by 832,000.

These are curious trends, and disturbing trends. Taken as a whole they suggest that people who lose their jobs are, in increasing numbers, simply giving up on working.

That is not a healthy trend for any economy. Is the United States seeing a labor phenomenon similar to the “lying flat” trend among younger Chinese workers? The data tells us that may be exactly what is happening.

Wage Growth Disappoints Overall

Paychecks proved another disappointment in the June ESS. While wage growth is still occurring, in June it appears to have continued the recent trend of losing ground to inflation once again.

We have yet to see the June CPI print, but unless it flatlines for the month, wage growth will still prove to have been less than inflation.

When wages can't keep up inflation becomes a major economic concern as well as a political one. With less money to spend relative to rising prices, workers’ overall consumption is restrained, and that means economic growth is constrained.

Since the start of Operation Epic Fury and the war with Iran, wages have not kept pace with inflation. That does not augur well for overall consumption in the second quarter. With less real income, people overall have less means for consumption, which will push down economic growth in this country.

In another demonstration of how uneven the June jobs data is, the changes in nominal pay became more highly volatile during the month.

Curiously, or perhaps a reflection of the broader implications of shifting job growth numbers among sectors, the sectors who lost jobs showed the most wage gain, while the sectors showing job growth also printed slower wage growth.

Strictly speaking, wages are the “price” of labor. If labor demand is falling in a particular sector, as evidenced by job loss for the month, then we would expect to see slower wage growth as well.

In the real world, wages are a good deal less elastic. It is quite possible the shifts in wage growth are at least in some measure a direct consequence of May’s job growth numbers.

Continuing Jobs Recovery Or Slide Back Into Jobs Recession?

The overarching question surround the jobs data is whether or not we are seeing a continuing jobs recovery, or seeing labor markets in the US slipping back into recession?

While the June jobs data shows a slowdown in job growth, it still shows job growth. Relative to prior months, the June data still shows fairly robust jobs growth. Before March, an ESS jobs print of 57,000 jobs would have been unanimously viewed as a strong jobs report. We would have said the same thing about an ADP print of 98,000 jobs for the month.

Even after the robust job increases of April and May, both the ADP and ESS reports are still respectable reports showing in the aggregate respectable job growth.

Yet the data remains troubling. Any month where the Household Survey data diverges from the Establishment Survey data is a month where we must take all the data with an extra large grain of salt, as Lou Costello Labor Math means the overall numbers do not add up.

June was a month where the Household Survey diverged from the Establishment Survey. The numbers do not add up.

As robust as job growth numbers have been recently, wage growth remains a disappointment, as rising inflation is overwhelming increases in workers’ paychecks.

Are we seeing a continuing jobs recovery, or are we seeing labor markets in the US slipping back into recession?

On the strength of just the June data, it would be premature to call an end to the nascent jobs recovery we have seen over the past few months. The sector level numbers are in many sectors a disappointment, but other sectors did very well, more than compensating for job losses elsewhere. Wage growth is again a disappointment, but largely because of rising inflation pressures undercutting wage gains.

At the same time, the jobs data is warning us that all is far from well in US labor markets. The jobs data is telling us that the employed labor force is declining, and that workers as a percentage of the overall population are declining. The jobs data is indicating that if workers leave the labor force, they are giving up on working altogether.

Are workers choosing “lying flat” over searching for a job? That is certainly one interpretation of the data. If we see similar shifts among the civilian labor force and those no longer in it, we may have to pay particular attention to that interpretation.

The June jobs data shows cooler job growth than in May, by a wide margin. On just about every metric, June was a worse month for jobs than May.

The June jobs numbers are technically “not bad”, but the June jobs reports make it clear that labor stumbled. That’s never a good shift in the narrative, and if the numbers do not move back in the direction of more robust job growth over the coming months, it could mean that the jobs recovery is already petering out, and a jobs recession is coming back into the picture.

A return to jobs recession is of course a bad thing, and that would make the June jobs reports bad reports. We are not there yet, but we have moved away from where we can say the reports are unambiguously good reports.

Labor stumbled in June. Hopefully labor stumbles only in June.

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No such intersovereign concerns apply to children born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States; no foreign sovereign would “have any motive for wishing” them outside this Nation’s authority. Ibid. Those children are thus subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. They satisfy both elements of the Citizenship Clause: they are “born . . . in the United States” and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth

Roberts is wrong.

Roberts is wrong on the history.

Roberts is wrong on the law.

Roberts is wrong on the Constitution.

This is what happens when judges let politics triumph over the law.

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With nearly two hundred pages of rambling and functionally irrelevant dicta, Roberts sought to conceal that he was not ruling on the law but rather enacting his own views into law. The Roberts ruling in Trump v Barbara is the worst example of judicial activism in decades.

For the Chief Justice of the United States, that is an especially noxious judicial sin. Roberts completely cast aside the standard of judicial review laid down so eloquently by Chief Justice John Marshall over two centuries ago in Marbury v Madison2:

It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.

It is not the duty of the courts to say what the law should be. Roberts forgot this, to his eternal shame and humiliation.

I have written at some length on the topic of birthright citizenship, most recently to defend President Trump’s Executive Order 14160. During President Trump’s first term of office, I contemplated what was then only a proposed Executive Order in light of the Court’s ruling in Wong Kim Ark3, until now the main pillar of judicial reasoning on the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. I have also scrutinized how to read the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction.”

Unlike John Roberts, I based my analyses on the actual text and the actual history of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the legal principles upon which it is based. My writings on this topic stand, and I am quite confident they are a superior treatment of the issues than Roberts’ 194 pages of juridical posturing. I invite everyone to read them, critique them, and challenge me on them.

That John Roberts is wandering down the path of politics is immediately evident with the beginning of his rationalizations. After a brief and perfunctory recitation of the issues in the case, Roberts immediately jumps off the judicial reasoning train to drag the infamous but irrelevant case Dred Scott v Sandford4.

To understand the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, it is first necessary to understand the context in which it arose—and the opinion of this Court, Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393 (1857), that it rejected.

This is categorically false.

Dred Scott has no overlap with Trump v Barbara, not on the facts and not on the law.

President Trump’s Executive Order 141605 made no pretense that citizenship was derived from a person’s race or ethnic makeup. The Court was not asked to rule that citizenship was so derived.

Dred Scott has absolutely no legal relevance to the particulars of President Trump’s Executive Order. The only purpose dragging that infamous ruling into the present case is to confuse and conflate the issues, to argue—falsely—that there is some racial or ethnic animus behind EO 14160.

Rather than simply ruling on Trump’s EO, John Roberts decided to “settle” the question of birthright citizenship once and for all in a burst of hubris on par with Roger Taney’s infamous arrogance in issuing the indefensible Dred Scott v Sanford ruling which declared that black people could have no rights under the Constitution.

Taney’s effort to “settle” the question of slavery in the United States propelled the country down the path towards the Civil War. We should be gravely concerned that Roberts’ effort to “settle” the question of birthright citizenship may suffer a similarly ignominious fate.

Having thus gone to great lengths to muddy the legal waters of this case, Roberts then goes on to fundamentally misstate much of the history on citizenship within English common law upon which American common law is built. Justice Clarence Thomas repeatedly calls Roberts out for his errors of fact in his very excellent dissenting opinion6.

Most crucially, Roberts overlooks the crucial consensus within English sources that birthright citizenship does not attach when the parents are “alien enemies” in conflict with the host nation.

Wong Kim Ark explicitly acknowledged this:

The real object of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, in qualifying the words, “All persons born in the United States” by the addition “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” would appear to have been to exclude, by the fewest and fittest words (besides children of members of the Indian tribes, standing in a peculiar relation to the National Government, unknown to the common law), the two classes of cases -- children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation and children of diplomatic representatives of a foreign State -- both of which, as has already been shown, by the law of England and by our own law from the time of the first settlement of the English colonies in America, had been recognized exceptions to the fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the country.

Let me reiterate this point, as Roberts chooses to pretend it does not exist: children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation have never been considered to receive birthright citizenship.

The concept of the enemy alien is pivotal to the correct view of the Fourteenth Amendment, and we need to be clear on the meaning of the term7:

In customary international law, an enemy alien is any native, citizen, denizen or subject of any foreign nation or government with which a domestic nation or government is in conflict and who is liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed.

As I have stated previously, any person who illegally enters any country clearly has a conflict with that country. The very act of illegal entry is a defiance of the laws of that country. That is conflict by definition.

In every sense of the term, an “illegal alien” is by definition also an “enemy alien”. That much is easily seen when one reviews the legal foundations behind President Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to remove transnational gang members from the United States.

The Alien Enemies Act has been a fixture of US law for far longer than has the Fourteenth Amendment. Unlike the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Alien Enemies Act is indisputably settled US law.

What makes Roberts’ legal confabulations in Trump v Barbara especially perplexing is that the Supreme Court upheld President Trump’s proclamation declaring the transnational gang Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist group that had “invaded” the United States8. At the very least, the Supreme Court has already upheld the notion that “illegal aliens” can be declared “alien enemies”.

Remember, even under English common law antecedents, enemy aliens do not endow their offspring with birthright citizenship.

Further, even if one blanches at the thought of recognizing all illegal aliens as enemy aliens, the realities of lacking legal status still lead to the same end point that illegal aliens cannot endow their progeny with birthright citizenship.

As Clarence Thomas argues eloquently in his dissent, any person in this country on a transient, temporary basis is not domiciled in the United States, and so birthright citizenship cannot attach to their offspring.

The United States thus did not claim as a citizen every child born on its soil. Instead, pursuant to the principle that children followed their parents’ domicile, a child was a citizen of the place where his parents were domiciled. “[A] child born of foreign parents is not, on principles of natural reason, necessarily to be considered as a citizen of the country where he is born.” 1 Tucker 57 (emphasis deleted). If he was “born in the country,” but “both his parents were strangers not designing a permanent change of country,” then he was “as much a stranger to the country as his father.” Ibid. The rule was that “when a subject is traveling or sojourning abroad,” he “continues under the protection of ” his home nation, so “his children” are “an exception to the rule which makes the place of birth the test of citizenship.” Ludlam v. Ludlam, 31 Barb. 486, 503 (N. Y. Gen. Term 1860); see also 37 Annals of Cong. 599 (1820) (statement of Rep. Hemphill) (for “citizenship” to be “acquired by birth,” a child must be born to “parents belonging to no other nation or tribe”); Hardy v. De Leon, 5 Tex. 211, 236–237 (1849) (a child born on American soil to parents domiciled in the then-Republic of Texas was a citizen of Texas); Political Code of New York §5 (1860) (citizenship requires “domicil[e]” and excludes “children of transient aliens”).

Any illegal alien is by definition always at risk for immediate deportation from the United States. By definition every illegal alien is also a “transient alien”. Consequently they cannot claim to be domiciled in the United States and therefore they cannot endow their offspring with birthright citizenship.

We must remember that this was the clear and explicit understanding of the Senate during the original debate on the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Senator who introduced the Amendment, Jacob Howard, made that absolutely clear:

I do not propose to say anything on that subject except that the question of citizenship has been so fully discussed in this body as not to need any further elucidation, in my opinion.

This amendment which I have offered is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States.

This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the government of the United States, but will include every other class of person.

Whether we view the illegal alien as an enemy alien, as has been explicitly done for transnational gang members, or as a transient alien, as Senator Howard clearly did in 1866, the end result is the same: no birthright citizenship accrues to their offspring.

In both perspectives, birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens is a clear Constitutional impossibility. It cannot happen, and it has never been understood to happen, not once in over three centuries of both English and American common law.

This is the irredeemable defect of Roberts nearly 200 pages of juridical pretense and posturing: he contorts and distorts clearly settled points of common law to impose a meaning on the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that it does not have and has never been understood to have.

Roberts’ ruling is not the law according to the United States Constitution. Roberts’ ruling is the law according to John Roberts.

Earlier I cited Chief Justice John Marshall’s seminal quote from Marbury on the role of the courts. That John Roberts has so clearly abandoned this well established understanding of judicial review within American jurisprudence leaves us with an uncomfortable truth encapsulated by another quote from Marbury:

…the theory of every such government must be that an act of the Legislature repugnant to the Constitution is void.

Just as the Congress and the Executive Branch are guided and constrained by the Constitution, so too are the courts. That was the explicit conclusion of Marbury.

If acts of Congress which are contrary to the Constitution are void on their face, if Presidential actions which are contrary to the Constitution are void on their face, then it must also be that court rulings—even those of the Supreme Court—which are contrary to the Constitution are void on their face.

There is no dispute to be had that Roberts’ ruling is contrary to the Constitution. There is thus no dispute to be had that Roberts ruling is void on its face.

Corporate media will pretend otherwise, and the popular narratives will present otherwise, but the fatal flaws of Roberts’ ruling mean that, by clear precedent and by the clear text of the Constitution, it cannot stand and it cannot overturn President Trump’s Executive Order.

Roberts’ ruling defines a political reality in which President Trump’s Executive Order 14160 has been overturned. The legal reality, which everyone will conveniently ignore, is that nothing has been overturned. Executive Order 14160 is still in full legal force. Birthright citizenship is still legally denied the children of illegal aliens.

Before a court ruling can enjoy the operative force of law, it must accurately and honestly state what the law is. That has been the standard for the American judiciary since John Marshall and Marbury v. Madison.

That is the standard Roberts abandoned with this ruling.

Instead of stating what the law is, John Roberts stated the law as he wished it would be. In so doing, he only managed to void his own ruling.

This is what happens when Supreme Court justices let politics triumph over the law.

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The number of job openings was unchanged at 7.6 million in May, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Hires were unchanged at 5.2 million, while total separations changed little at 5.1 million. Within separations, quits (3.1 million) changed little, while layoffs and discharges (1.7 million) were unchanged.

If we take the JOLTS report at face value, job markets in this country hardly change ever.

My advice: do not take the JOLTS report at face value.

On the surface, the JOLTS report appears strong, with job openings printing well above Wall Street projections, and even above Trading Economics more optimistic forecast.

What that seemingly robust job opening number obscures is the significant drop in private net hiring during the month of May.

What that seemingly robust job opening number obscures is the rise in separations during the month of May.

What that seemingly robust job opening number obscures is the fact that net hiring is significantly less in each job sector than the change in the All Employees data from the Employment Situation Summary. While not proof positive, the weak JOLTS net hiring is a warning signal there may be a major downward revision to the All Employees data in the near future.

For all the corporate media hooplah over job openings, the weak net hiring data suggests the May JOLTS report may be much ado over not very much.

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Corporate Media Loves Job Openings, All But Ignores Net Hiring

The number of new job openings is indisputably an optimistic number when it comes to jobs in this country. An employer posting a job opening presumably is a company hoping to expand its payroll, or at least sustain it.

When that job opening does not soon translate into actual hiring, the job opening might as well not even exist.

The Associated Press, as is the case with nearly all corporate media, ignores this simple reality in favor of pushing Wall Street’s preferred narrative that job openings tell the tale on US job markets. We can see that much just in their headline regarding the preferred narrative.

One has to get to the fourth paragraph before the AP report acknowledges that private net hiring is anemic at best.

Employers are advertising openings, but they aren’t actually doing much hiring. Gross hiring — before counting people who lost or quit their jobs — dipped to 5.17 million in May from 5.26 million in April. When the job market was booming from mid-2021 to mid-2023 after COVID-19 lockdowns, gross monthly hiring regularly topped 6 million.

Reuters buried the possibility the JOLTS report is signalling a downward revision on May jobs in the bottom half of its reporting on the BLS release.

“We were surprised to see the total hiring rate unchanged and the private hiring rate decline again in May despite stronger May job growth,” said Veronica Clark, an economist at Citigroup. “This could mean possible revisions lower to May data or weaker net job growth could reflect actions taken in the second half of May. This would suggest softer June employment.”

CNN, still the Most Busted Name In Fake News, once again lived down to its reputation by ignoring the drop in net hiring. Their take extrapolated solely from the job opening numbers to pronounce US jobs markets are still very robust.

“The hiring recession is over, and we are starting to see more industries look for workers again, and that’s really good news,” Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, told CNN in an interview Tuesday.

With the May Employment Situation Summary being the third consecutive strong jobs report, even I have considered the possibility that the jobs recession is now over.

However, such speculation should not blind us to the reality that a drop in net hiring on the JOLTS report is a signal that perhaps the jobs recession is not quite over. The JOLTS report is a signal we should not blithely ignore.

Job Openings Still Not Real

As wonderful as a high job openings number sounds—and 7.6 million job openings absolutely sounds wonderful and optimistic—the unalterable reality of the data is those job openings are not translating into actual hiring. We can see that just from the headline data itself.

What is frequently ignored is that the job openings data has printed well above hiring and separations ever since the start of the Biden Reign of Error, which is a marked change from pre-Pandemic Panic data.

If we strip away the job openings data, the hiring and separations data loses quite a bit of its luster.

Hiring and separations have been more volatile in recent months, but the longer term trend since the start of the Trump Administration 2.0 in January 2025 is still slightly down. March was the strongest hiring period in that time, but it comes on the heels of the worst hiring period, which was February.

As optimistic as 7.6 million job openings sounds, the reality is that net hiring is still not even attempting to fill that many openings, rendering most of them effectively unreal.

Net Hiring Declined Overall

One undeniable bright spot in the JOLTS report was that Manufacturing held its own, once again printing 10,000 net hires in May.

Leisure and Hospitality rebounded in May, with its net hiring of 47,000 very nearly equaling its March level.

Professional and Business Services had perhaps the best results, as its net hiring of 37,000 was its best result since April of 2025.

Construction, on the other hand, shed jobs in May according to the JOLTS report.

Healthcare also did not fare well on the May JOLTS report, shedding jobs in what has been a steady decline since January 2026.

Net Hiring for Trade Transportation and Utilities (TTU) simply vanished for May.

TTU shed jobs throughout most of 2025, and April was the first time since the start of Trump Administration 2.0 that TTU net hiring printed consecutive months of job growth.

Taken together, net hiring across all private sectors plunged from 173,000 jobs in April to just 34,000 jobs in May.

With the Employment Situation Summary having printed private sector job growth of 120,000 jobs in May, the JOLTS report is quite a bit less optimistic. The disparity between the ESS and JOLTS reports—86,000 jobs—is the largest such gap since February 2025.

There are good reasons to fear a major downward revision coming to the Employment Situation Summary data. Those same reasons also warn us the jobs recession perhaps is not quite over after all.

We do not want to abandon the jobs recovery narrative on the basis of one weak report in one month, just as we would not want to declare a jobs recovery on the basis of one strong report in one month. Still, we do well to be mindful of the possibility the jobs recovery was just a flash in the pan.

Openings Are The Least Important Data

Contrary to what Wall Street insists and what corporate media promotes, the job openings data itself is the least important data set in the entire JOLTS report.

When hiring responds to job openings, that data can be a useful leading indicator of where hiring might be heading. The data shows that, since the COVID Pandemic Panic of 2020 especially, hiring has not responded to job openings. Even worse for the job openings data is the reality that, since late 2014, job openings have not only exceeded hiring and separations, but that gap has grown steadily wider.

Perhaps most damning of all for the job openings data is that, from 2001 through 2014, the job openings number was consistently below hiring and separations.

The simple reality of job openings is that not a single job opening has economic significance until it is filled.

A job opening is not an expansion of payroll—a paycheck is.

A job opening is not a reduction in unemployment—a new hire is.

In the May JOLTS report, the least important number rose, while the most important number fell.

That is a warning sign. The data is reminding us that, for all the positive job growth data over the past few months, much about US labor markets remains unwell and unresolved.

The May JOLTS report is not a horrible report. Arguably it is not even a bad report.

It is a report that printed net hiring of 34,000 in May. That is still job growth, and that is very much a good thing, but 34,000 is quite the climbdown from 173,000.

That cooling off to the tune of 139,000 jobs not filled precludes the possibility the May JOLTS report is an indisputably good report.

There is some good in the May JOLTS report, but there is considerable bad as well.

Pay attention to both.

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The fourteen-point Memorandum of Understanding was simultaneously clear on what would be negotiated and vague on the final outcomes, other than there was to be peace both in the Persian Gulf and in Lebanon.

Except peace never really emerged in Lebanon, and it is now fading rapidly in the Persian Gulf, as tit-for-tat media announcements metastasizes into tit-for-tat drone and missile strikes.

Is there still a ceasefire at this point? With escalating strikes between the US and Iran, that is a dubious assertion at best. Perhaps the ceasefire and peace talks are technically still in place, but the renewed exchange of drone and missile fire is hardening Iranian positions and attitudes, pushing the prospect of a final peace deal farther and farther beyond easy reach of negotiators on both sides.

A more honest appraisal arguably would be that the peace deal has been in slow-motion collapse almost since the completion of the Memorandum of Understanding ten days ago.

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Is Iran Reading The Same MOU?

From the moment the memorandum itself was announced, and even before its terms were made public, Iran and the United States had wildly different views on what the memorandum stated, with each side quick to contradict the other.

Even as the Memorandum of Understanding was being accepted two weeks ago, Iran was claiming the MOU was vastly different from President Trump’s depiction. Initially, Iranian media outlets were circulating no fewer than three different claimed versions of the MOU.

The disparity between Iranian and American depictions of what was in the Memorandum did not stop pro-Trump media outlets such as Breitbart from triumphantly proclaiming the war to have ended.

Yet even as pro-Trump outlets were taking a victory lap over the MOU, Iran was asserting the MOU was something very much different from what had been reported, in particular reasserting its persistent claim it can charge a toll on shipping navigating the Strait of Hormuz.

Vessels that cross the Strait of Hormuz will need a mandatory insurance policy that is currently free but could have a cost in the future, the country’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA) said in a document on its website. It also said that ships must follow its prescribed route, instructions that appear to run counter to guidance late Thursday by western naval groups, which advised ships to hug the Omani coast.

Point Five of the published terms of the Memorandum do not support Iran’s contention:

5 — Upon signing this Memorandum of Understanding, the Islamic Republic of Iran will immediately take steps to ensure that the movement of merchant ships from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa is resumed within 30 days to the pre-war volume, taking into account the need for the removal of technical obstacles and the neutralization of mines by Iran.

Also contradicting Point Five was the recurring IRGC demand for an upfront release of frozen Iranian assets, before even any substantive talks took place.

The Strait of Hormuz should not be reopened until several conditions under the Iran-US MoU are met, among them the release of at least $12 billion in Iranian assets, the implementation of oil sanctions waivers, and Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, the IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News said on Saturday.

This was a contention that has been rejected by President Trump every time it has been raised.

In a reference to criticism over the deal from both sides of the political aisle in Washington, President Trump reiterated his insistence in his Friday post that Iran would “get no money, not ten cents!” under the deal signed this week.

When Vice President JD Vance intimated that frozen assets might be released to allow Iran to purchase needed humanitarian supplies for the Iranian people from the US, the Iranians were quick to insist that no strings would be attached to the release of any Iranian assets.

The dichotomy began pushing tensions to a breaking point when Iran rejected the idea of discussion inspections of its nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

US Vice President JD Vance said the talks with Iranian officials in the Swiss mountain resort of Buergenstock laid a good foundation for a final accord and that Tehran had agreed to allow nuclear inspectors back into the country.

But Iran denied it had begun discussions on its nuclear program at the talks, mediated by Qatar and Pakistan, and said it had not agreed to invite back International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors.

IRAN SAYS IT WILL DECIDE ALONE ON ASSETS’ USE

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei said on Tuesday Iranian officials had not held a meeting with IAEA chief Rafael Grossi in Switzerland and had no plans for the UN nuclear watchdog to inspect Iran’s damaged nuclear ‌facilities.

We should take careful note that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which Iran is a signatory, obligates non-nuclear states such as Iran to submit to IAEA inspections to ensure treaty compliance.

Each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes to accept safeguards, as set forth in an agreement to be negotiated and concluded with the International Atomic Energy Agency in accordance with the Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Agency’s safeguards system, for the exclusive purpose of verification of the fulfilment of its obligations assumed under this Treaty with a view to preventing diversion of nuclear energy from peaceful uses to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices. Procedures for the safeguards required by this Article shall be followed with respect to source or special fissionable material whether it is being produced, processed or used in any principal nuclear facility or is outside any such facility. The safeguards required by this Article shall be applied on all source or special fissionable material in all peaceful nuclear activities within the territory of such State, under its jurisdiction, or carried out under its control anywhere.

Iran’s leaders are simply ignoring both past and present treaty commitments as part of its overall negotiating posture.

At no point have Iranian and US depictions of the peace talks taking place in Switzerland aligned with each other. So wide is the disparity one has to wonder if the negotiators are actually talking with each other.

Iran Broke The Ceasefire?

With both sides clearly talking past each other publicly, the question of the 60-day ceasefire initiated by the Memorandum breaking down has perhaps always been more of “when” rather than “if”.

Even so, tensions began to mount when reports emerged from UK Maritime Trade Operations of fresh attacks on ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

The UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) previously reported that a vessel was struck by “an unknown projectile” while operating off the coast of Oman, but did not attribute the attack to any particular nation-state or actor. The UKMTO, which is operated by the British Royal Navy, said the projectile damaged the bridge of the vessel but reported no injuries or environmental impact as a result of the attack.

When reached for comment about the attack, a U.S. official said Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched a drone at the vessel in question.

The U.N. International Maritime Organization paused its operation to escort ships through ‌the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday after Iranian forces attacked a cargo vessel in the Strait of Hormuz a day before.

Perhaps predictably, the United States responded with strikes on Iranian targets near to the Strait.

U.S. aircraft struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations and coastal radar sites after Iran hit M/V Ever Lovely on June 25 with a one-way attack drone. The Singapore-flagged cargo ship was exiting the Strait of Hormuz along the Omani coast at the time of Iran’s attack.

The unwarranted aggression against commercial shipping by Iranian forces clearly violated the ceasefire. Furthermore, Iran’s dangerous behavior undermined freedom of navigation as commerce increasingly flows through the vital international trade corridor.

Prior to the strike, President Trump was coy about how the US would respond to the Iranian drone strike on a civilian ship. When asked if the US would respond Trump’s answer to the media was simply “you’re gonna find out.”

Shortly after Trump made those remarks, Iran really did “find out.”

In the alternate reality that is global geopolitics, this naked exchange of hostilities was not considered an abrupt cessation of the ceasefire, as various media outlets pushed competing narratives on whether the strikes were substantial or performative.

Perhaps if that had been the only exchange between the US and Iran, we could plausibly consider the ceasefire to be in place. It has not been the only exchange.

Iran Escalates, The US Escalates, Iran Escalates Its Escalation

In response to the US strikes on Iranian targets, Iran chose to escalate with a ballistic missile strike on Kuwait, according to the Kuwaiti Ministry of Defense.

The official spokesperson of the Ministry of Defense, Major General Saud Abdulaziz Al-Otaibi,

stated that the armed forces detected at dawn today two hostile ballistic missiles within Kuwaiti airspace, which were intercepted and dealt with in accordance with approved operational procedures.

No material damage or human injuries resulted from this.

The armed forces affirm their continued performance of their duties and responsibilities with efficiency and capability, within a framework of ongoing readiness and permanent preparedness, thereby enhancing the security of the homeland and preserving the safety of citizens and residents.

There were reports of an attack on a second ship in the Strait of Hormuz as well.

Almost predictably, the US has responded with another round of air strikes against Iran.

In a statement, US Central Command (CENTCOM), which directs military action in the Middle East, explained that the latest attacks came “at the Commander in Chief’s direction”.

“CENTCOM forces launched strikes today in direct response to continued Iranian aggression against commercial shipping,” the command centre wrote.

“U.S. military aircraft targeted Iranian military surveillance infrastructure, communication systems, air defense sites, drone storage facilities, and minelayer capabilities.”

Explosions were reported in southern Iran, around the village of Tahrui, near the port of Sirik, which was also the focal point of Friday’s US attacks. State media also indicated that Qeshm Island had been hit.

Iran responded by targeting Bahrain as well as Kuwait.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Sunday local time that it carried out strikes against Kuwait and Bahrain in retaliation for U.S. attacks on Iranian territory, warning any further aggression would be met with a “crushing response.”

Separately, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has reiterated Iran’s claim of sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, asserting that Iran alone has control—and responsibility—over the Strait’s reopening.

Iran alone is responsible for managing and fully reopening maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz under recent understandings, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Sunday in Baghdad.

Speaking at a news conference with Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein, Araghchi said the reopening would take place after existing obstacles were removed and that implementation was underway.

“No other country or institution has any responsibility in this regard,” Araghchi said.

Most ominously is a recent article appearing in IRGC-affiliated Iranian news outlet Fars claiming that Iran “must” develop nuclear weapons in order to preserve peace in the Persian Gulf.

During the transition to the new order, Iran has no choice but to reach nuclear deterrence to remove the military option to occupy and break up Iran. In order to achieve the peace needed by Iran, it must be necessary to reach a nuclear deterrence to ensure that the rest of the negotiations will be resolved. Only then can the negotiation take place from the right position.

Bear in mind that Iran agreed explicitly in the Memorandum that it would never develop nuclear weapons (Point Eight).

8 — The Islamic Republic of Iran reiterates that it will never produce nuclear weapons. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States have agreed that the fate of enriched material and the fate of all other mutually agreed nuclear-related issues, including Iran’s nuclear needs, will be adequately addressed in a final agreement; the final agreement will confirm the provisions of this Article.

This is in addition to being a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which further obligates Iran not to pursue a nuclear weapons program.

We must note also that Iran has not been in compliance with the NPT for many years. The origin of many of the sanctions against the regime have arisen from its refusal to cooperate with the IAEA on inspections and to otherwise confirm to the expectations of the NPT.

More War? Or A Faux Peace?

Whether the ceasefire is still in place, or whether Iran and the US have resumed hostilities probably depends very much on whom one asks the question.

Technically, the 60-day ceasefire is still in place. Technically, the Switzerland peace talks have not been suspended.

But even as the MOU was being finalized and signed, the rhetoric coming out of Tehran has been contradictory and bellicose. President Trump has been quite willing to match Tehran’s muscular warlike remarks. As the recent tit-for-tat strikes have demonstrated, both sides are willing to inflict a modicum of damage on the other, although neither side has committed to an all-out attack in the vein of Operation Epic Fury.

We might even question whether the recent exchanges between the US and Iran are a true shift, or if they are merely the inevitable progression from the contradictory and ultimately uncooperative rhetoric which has been the hallmark of the Switzerland peace talks.

We should definitely question whether either side is truly ready for peace talks, and truly wants a peaceful, diplomatic resolution to Iran’s (illegal) nuclear weapons program and (illegal) seizure of the Strait of Hormuz. If we go strictly by the events of the past week, we would be hard pressed to conclude that Iran and the US genuinely desire to have peaceful relations at this point.

Whether there is still technically a ceasefire, still technically peace talks being conducted, is becoming increasingly irrelevant as tit-for-tat attacks on each other’s strategic assets in the region escalate. At some point such back and forth attacks will escalate to the point where talk of ceasefire seems quaint; we may already be at that point.

Despite the high hopes that accompanied President Trump’s initial announcement that the MOU had been agreed and adopted, the reality has been that the IRGC especially, but broadly the whole of the Iranian government, simply does not want peace.

The Trump Administration says it desires peace, but its rhetoric has been more along the lines of making peace with the possibility of renewed war. President Trump has not shifted his initial “red lines” on Iran, most especially the absolute prohibition on Iran ever obtaining nuclear weapons.

As the peace deal continues its slow and seemingly inevitable collapse, the question of whether or not there is still a ceasefire is increasingly likely to be answered in the negative. If escalations continue, the current faux peace will eventually be acknowledged as more war.

That appears to be where this has always been headed, and we’re just now finally arriving there.

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From the preceding month, the PCE price index for May increased 0.4 percent. Excluding food and energy, the PCE price index increased 0.3 percent.

From the same month one year ago, the PCE price index for May increased 4.1 percent. Excluding food and energy, the PCE price index increased 3.4 percent from one year ago.

We know that prices are rising.

We even know why prices are rising: an oil price and supply shock after Iran illegally closed the Strait of Hormuz during the hopefully-ended war between the US and Iran.

What we do not know is how much more inflation are we likely to see. We also do not know how impactful renewed inflation will eventually be.

Corporate media continues to fret about inflation moving higher, and for the usual propaganda reasons. What corporate media overlooks is that there are signs this latest inflation cycle may have already run its course, and even more signs that the economy is not suffering as much as some have feared due to rising prices.

Inflation is rising, but is it also ending? Quite possibly, it is. At the very least, the risk of a stagflation crisis has diminished.

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Headline Inflation Continues To Rise Faster Than Core

At 4.1% year on year, there is no denying that the PCE report shows inflation continuing to heat up in the US economy.

Yet it is also important to note that core inflation—consumer price inflation with food and energy prices stripped out—continued to increase at a significantly slower pace.

Even month on month, headline inflation is rising much faster than core inflation.

Not only is headline inflation outpacing core inflation, but the margin of increase has been greater over the past three months than at any time since the start of President Trump’s second term of office.

What is frequently overlooked in most media reporting on inflation is that core inflation has been moving steadily higher since last fall, while headline inflation’s recent rise is catalyzed mainly by energy prices.

That core inflation’s rise began last fall is particularly relevant given the obvious inflation impact of the oil supply shock which began in March, when Iran illegally closed off the Strait of Hormuz. While that oil supply shock presents significant risk of stagflation for most of the world’s economies, that risk has thus far largely not materialized in the US economy. The US is seeing primarily energy prices rise from the supply shock, but is not seeing significant contagion effect, where energy price inflation catalyzes additional price increases for other goods and services.

Corporate Media Obsessed With Interest Rates

The lack of a significant stagflation crisis in the US thus far has been almost entirely overlooked by corporate media. Instead, corporate media’s concerns about rising inflation have been revolving primarily around whether or not an increase in consumer price inflation will push the Federal Reserve to raise the federal funds rate. Even before the May inflation print came out, the main concern regarding the report was how it would be received by the Federal Reserve.

The monthly PCE report is the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge. New Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh has said the central bank is committed to bringing inflation back to its 2% target — a level it has failed to reach for the past five years. Wall Street now anticipates the Fed will raise its key interest rate at least once by year’s end in a bid to counteract the stronger price growth.

By making it more expensive to borrow money, the Fed slows overall economic activity and, with it, the pace of price increases.

“Thursday’s PCE is set to take on greater importance for markets, especially since Federal Reserve Chair Warsh was emphatic in last week’s meeting about the central bank’s desire to achieve price stability, and this PCE reading could affect the market’s rate hike expectations,” Rick Gardner, chief investment officer at North Carolina-based RGA Investments, said in a statement.

Corporate media reporting after the report was released kept focusing on a narrative of rising inflation means the Fed will likely raise interest rates later this year.

The report comes a little more than a week after the Fed and new Chairman Kevin Warsh delivered what markets widely viewed as a tough talk on rates and inflation.

Warsh in particular stressed the importance of price stability, with the Federal Open Market Committee adopting language in its post-meeting statement unequivocally stating that it would “deliver price stability” after missing its 2% inflation target for five years running. In addition, officials took off a previously indicated rate cut this year and indicated a likelihood of a hike.

Axios even regarded the US economy’s seeming resilience in the face of rising inflation as a negative, lamenting how consumers were not “cracking”, but were continuing to spend and consume despite rising prices.

Inflation is bad, we are told, not because of its impact on the prices consumers must pay for goods and services, but because of what it “forces” the Federal Reserve to do with respect to the federal funds rate. What the reporting never gets around to acknowledging is that the Fed is never obligated to raise or reduce the federal funds rate.

Perversely corporate media’s focus on the inflation reports potential impact on future Fed interest rate decisions highlights the importance of newly-minted Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh’ decision to curtail most of the Fed’s “forward guidance” following the latest Federal Open Market Committee decision to stand pat on the federal funds rate. Instead of examining how the economy is responding to rising prices, corporate media—and, presumably, Wall Street overall—is keeping one eye on the Federal Reserve, looking to the Fed for guidance on what the response “should be”.

If people harbored any lingering doubts that the Federal Reserve is exerting too much influence over financial decision-making in the broader US economy, how the media covers the official inflation reports does much to put those doubts to rest.

Energy Price Inflation Largely Unchanged

While energy price inflation remained the dominant component within overall consumer price inflation, month on month energy price inflation itself did not change much.

Oil supply disruptions from the Strait’s closure are continuing to exert pressure on energy prices in the US, but that pressure did not increase significantly in May.

If anything, it is remarkable that energy price inflation did not come down in May, given the decrease in gasoline and diesel prices throughout the month.

The persistence of energy price inflation in May is even more remarkable considering the decline in benchmark crude prices.

That energy price inflation apparently has not fully captured all of the price decreases in May suggests that energy price inflation may be about to come down, particularly month on month.

Without continued energy price inflation, headline inflation cannot continue to rise at its current pace.

Food price inflation, the other inflation component outside of core inflation, certainly is not likely to push the headline index up the way energy prices have. After a significant month on month surge in April, food price inflation cooled way down in May.

While food price inflation had been rising since mid-2024, since last summer it has broadly stabilized.

Food prices are stripped out of core inflation calculations largely because of their greater volatility, just as with energy prices. Yet the fact that we are not seeing a dramatic inflation surge in food prices from the oil supply shock is the strongest signal we have that energy price inflation is not pushing up other prices, at least not yet.

For all the reporting of inflation heating up, the reality of May’s inflation report is that energy price inflation did not really change, and food price inflation actually fell.

Has the current inflation cycle already reached its peak? Food and energy prices suggest it may have.

Durable Goods In Deflation For May

A further signal that inflation may have already peaked comes from durable and non-durable goods prices in May.

Durable goods prices actually fell in May, and non-durable goods showed price disinflation, despite the continued pressure from energy prices. Service price inflation rose month on month, but is still below its recent January 2026 peak.

That non-durable goods inflation eased in May suggests that, outside of energy prices, non-durable goods might very well have been in deflation for May as well. Certainly when energy price inflation is put next to non-durable goods inflation, we can see that energy prices are the dominant factor in non-durable goods inflation.

Just as with the earlier CPI report, the PCE report is showing considerable energy price inflation, but not much additional inflation.

If energy price inflation eases next month or the month after, there is simply not much inflation in other areas to sustain the current headline inflation rates. If energy price inflation tips back into outright deflation, as it did for most of 2023 through mid-2025, headline inflation will ease dramatically.

AI: The One Contrarian Signal

If we look at just the broad pricing data, we could easily conclude that this latest inflation cycle has already reached its peak and that, barring a major change such as renewed hostilities with Iran, consumer price inflation is poised to cool significantly. We would be remiss not to acknowledge that could very easily prove to be the case.

Yet we should note that energy is not the only source of inflationary pressure in the US economy. One area that is exerting increasing pressure is computer technology.

With events in the Middle East dominating headlines worldwide, little attention was given last week to outgoing Apple Computer CEO Tim Cook’s warning that the tech giant was about to raise prices across the board.

“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”

Yesterday, the warning became reality, when Apple announced price hikes across a broad range of products, citing pricing pressures from surging memory and chip prices.

“We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly,” Apple ​said in a statement. “We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin ⁠raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac.”

Apple hiked the price of MacBook Air with 512 gigabytes of storage rose to $1,299 from $1,099, while the MacBook ​Pro with 1 terabyte of storage rose to $1,999 from $1,699, according to updated prices on its website. The iPad Air with 128 gigabytes of storage rose from $599 to $749, among other changes.

Prices for computer hardware had been on the decline for years up until last year, when prices rebounded during the spring before easing back down later in the year.

Since January, hardware prices have repeated their early-2025 surge. Whether they will ease back down in the fall remains as yet unknown.

Driving much of the surge in hardware prices is the runaway interest in artificial intelligence, along with the building of data centers to meet that growing demand. As one would expect, the surge in computer hardware demand is producing a surge in prices.

With so much demand, prices are rising for many of the things that go into the AI build-out. And because those things are used for more than just AI, those price increases are spilling over into the broader economy.

Memory and storage chips, for example, are used in a broad array of consumer-electronics products that includes everything from videogame consoles to cars. Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony have all raised prices on devices. Higher price tags are coming to Apple products, too, according to Chief Executive Tim Cook, who told The Wall Street Journal that the jump in costs was unlike anything he had seen “in any area in over 40 years.”

According to Tim Cook and Apple, there is already contagion effect at work with chip and memory prices pushing up Apple prices.

Will AI fuel a renewed hyperinflation cycle? That is extremely unlikely. While data center buildouts can and will have impacts on local economies, the surge in component and overall tech prices has not resulted in a sustained inflation pressure across the broader economy. Despite a price surge in tech prices that is now months old, durable goods still went into deflation for May, while non-durable goods showed notable price disinflation.

At the same time, we must recall that core price inflation was trending higher long before Operation Epic Fury and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. There are clearly inflation pressures at work on the US economy besides energy.

Is Artificial Intelligence one of these inflation pressures? If we take Tim Cook’s warning last week seriously, yes, it is. Against a rising number of inflation signals suggesting inflation is close to being done heating up, computer tech prices stand out as a notable contrarian signal.

Is Stagflation Still Possible?

When Iran first closed the Strait of Hormuz, I noted that, given the softness that had been the prevailing trend in US labor markets, stagflation from the oil shock from the Strait’s closure was a real possibility. Given the “fugly” jobs report we had in February, a stagflation crisis was a very real risk for the US economy at that time.

Since that time, we have had three months of good jobs numbers, including back-to-back revisions to the upside. The soft jobs markets of February have morphed into robust and recovering job markets for May.

With stronger job markets and softer core inflation, at present the risks of a 1970s-style stagflation crisis in the US are greatly diminished. The risks here in the US are apparently less than in the EU, given the European Central Bank’s recent decision to raise interest rates, in contrast to the Fed’s decision to stand pat on interest rates.

That does not mean the risks are non-existent. Some of the members of the Federal Open Market Committee have indicated the Fed may raise the federal funds rate at least once during the remainder of the year.

If American jobs markets soften again, the potential for stagflation will return.

If consumer price inflation surges such as it did in March, the potential for stagflation will return.

If both happen at the same time, the potential for stagflation not only returns, but moves from a possibility to a probability.

At present, jobs markets are not softening and inflation is not surging, but if the last few months are testament to anything it is the capacity of even broad economic metrics to shift dramatically from one month to the next.

Stagflation is still very possible, but unless there is a significant shift in either jobs or prices for June, stagflation is for now not very probable.

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But there is more to economic data than just jobs numbers, and more to economic growth than just employment. There is consumption. There are measures of industrial production without regard to employment. There are measures of industrial capacity utilization.

It is intuitively obvious that rising retail sales—rising consumption—is a sign the economy is expanding.

It is equally intuitively obvious that rising industrial production is a positive sign. To borrow from the late H. Ross Perot, we need to be making more “things”.

For the same reason, we are doing better the more of the nation’s industrial capacity is being put to work.

With the political primaries largely over and done, and the several states heading into the general election in November, it is worthwhile to look beyond jobs and prices, to gauge how the broader health of the US economy, which is sure to be part of the political debate as the fall election season heats up.

With the US also moving from war to a problematic peace with Iran, the next few months could easily prove to be a pivotal time for the US economy. Assessing the state of the US economy now might be helpful in assessing how well the US moves forward now that the war with Iran is arguably over.

It is particularly worthwhile at the moment, because the data shows the economy is doing fairly well. The data leans into the job growth narrative from the May Employment Situation Summary and tells us that the job growth in May was more real than not.

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PMI Data Shows Growth Trend

The most positive notes come from the independent Purchasing Managers Index1, or PMI, surveys.

The May Manufacturing PMI from S&P Global is the third consecutive month of increasing expansion.

Not only does the PMI data show manufacturing concerns in this country to be expanding, the amount of that expansion is increasing.

An important caveat: we must be cautious with the PMI data. At the end of the analysis the PMI data is an industry survey, and therefore all the possibilities for error we see within BLS data on jobs can happen with the PMI data. Always take PMI stats with a grain of salt.

However, the Institute for Supply Management maintains its own PMI data and conducts its own surveys. When the ISM PMI data shows the same trend as S&P Global, that is a confirmation we should not be quick to overlook.

What both manufacturing PMI data sets show is that, beginning in January, US economic activity has been expanding.

The S&P Global services PMI data for May showed expansion, but also indicated the growth was potentially fragile and not at all assured.

The ISM Services PMI data for May shows a stronger expansion, one that goes back potentially back to before the start of Donald Trump’s second term in the Oval Office.

The S&P Global and ISM surveys are conducted independent of each other. While as surveys we need to be cautious about how much significance to place on them, that both survey sets show expansion for both manufacturing and service industries makes the data difficult to dismiss.

The PMI data across the board shows the US economy is expanding right now.

Retail Sales Are Increasing

The U.S. Census Bureau gives another positive growth signal with its measurements of retail sales.

As of May, 2026, the Advanced Retail Sales estimate shows year on year sales growth of 7.5%.

Month on Month, Advanced Retail Sales grew by 1% in May.

More importantly, retail sales—which are measured in nominal dollars—are growing faster than the Consumer Price Index. Sales growth is greater than inflation, which means there is real growth in consumption.

Consumption—by far the largest component of the US economy—is demonstrably robust, and has been almost since the start of President Trump’s second term.

Industrial Production Is Increasing

America’s performance in manufacturing is an especially important consideration. Not only do manufacturing jobs generally command higher wages than most service jobs, but a major campaign promise made by President Trump in 2024 was to turn the United States into a “manufacturing superpower”.

Overall, industrial production has been strengthening in this country since Donald Trump took office at the start of 2025.

Even sectors that started out well under Joe Biden have been picking up under President Trump.

Additionally, US capacity utilization has been increasing steadily under Donald Trump, which is a clear reversal from the long decline under Joe Biden.

These growth metrics, assessed independently of manufacturing jobs, resonate well with the manufacturing sector’s recent return to job growth.

When we see independent data sets supporting the same broad narrative, we necessarily have greater confidence in that narrative. With industrial production growth, capacity utilization growth, and finally manufacturing job growth, a narrative that the manufacturing sectors of the US economy are growing is difficult to refute.

America is making more things, and America is putting more people to work making more things. These are exactly the sort of economic outcomes we need to see if Donald Trump’s pledge to make the US a “manufacturing superpower” is to be realized.

At the moment, the data says Donald Trump’s pledge is being realized.

Staving off Stagflation?

The economic growth outlook has taken on added importance because of the war with Iran, and Iran’s subsequent illegal closure of the Strait of Hormuz, slapping an oil price and supply shock on the world’s economies by effectively bottling up 20% of total global oil supply.

When the war had largely turned into an attritional stalemate over the Strait, with Iran blocking oil shipments from its Arab neighbors and the US blockading Iranian shipping in return, the prevailing assessments indicated that the situation was sending the worlds’ economies into a stagflation crisis, as the sudden loss of global oil supply was setting the stage for global demand destruction.

We do well to remember that signature aspect of supply shocks and the stagflation they can produce. When physical supply is abruptly diminished, physical demand must also be diminished to restore overall economic equilibrium. If the physical supply of widgets goes from 100 down to 80, the physical demand for widgets must also go down to 80, for the simple reason that 80 widgets are all that is available. There cannot be any demand for goods (or quantities) which do not exist.

When an economy is already in the doldrums, such as when job growth is weak or when overall economic growth is weak, a supply shock is particularly thorny, as the demand destruction will push a moribund economy into outright recession.

When Operation Epic Fury began, then-Fed Chair Jay Powell was dismissive of stagflation concerns, when the data clearly showed there was significant risk of stagflation emerging from the Strait of Hormuz closure.

No, we are not seeing stagflation at present, except in the most incremental and technical fashion. The oppositional forces are present and discernible, but they are not (yet) at a 1970s level of severity.

We are, however, seeing several indicators that a stagflation scenario is a real risk to the economy. A significant inflation shock coupled with the soft labor markets the United States has endured for the past few years could very easily translate into a stagflation scenario.

What has changed since then for the US economy has been the transition from jobs recession to jobs recovery. With multiple consecutive months of robust job growth as of the most recent Employment Situation Summary report, the US economy is in a stronger position now than it was just a few months ago.

A broader sweep of economic data indicates that economic strength has some depth to it. The stronger and more robust the US economy is, the better it will be able to withstand the pricing pressures which will linger for a time from the oil shock.

We are already seeing some indication of the benefits of a stronger economy. While the Federal Reserve saw fit to stand pat on the federal funds rate, the European Central Bank is raising interest rates to combat a worsening stagflation crisis on the continent.

Will the US avoid a stagflation scenario altogether? That is highly unlikely. The energy price shock itself has already made itself known. The real misery index—the combination of real unemployment and year on year consumer price inflation—is rising. To a degree, the stagflation scenario has already begun for the United States.

If the US continues to show strong increases in industrial production, capacity utilization, and manufacturing job growth, we may see the misery index rise less sharply than would otherwise have been the case. We may see less overall demand destruction and greater tolerance for consumer price inflation at least in the short term.

If the peace deal is proven to be substantive and real, and brings meaningful change to the Persian Gulf states, a strong US economy would potentially position the US well to reap tangible benefits from that change. It is far too soon to know if the US will “win the peace” with Iran, but a stronger US economy is surely a better position from which that can happen.

Between the upcoming mid-term elections and the unfolding peace with Iran, right now is an important economic moment for the United States. Fortunately, at this moment, a substantial number of economic signals are showing the US economy is growing.

That’s a nice piece of good news.

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The Committee decided to maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 3-1/2 to 3-3/4 percent, in support of the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate. The Committee reaffirmed its policy of maintaining ample reserves in the banking system.

This was exactly what Wall Street had priced in weeks ago. On the rate announcement, Wall Street was not disappointed.

Then newly-minted Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh opened up his mouth, and it was that moment when the markets started heading south, dropping nearly 600 points over the course of the post-FOMC presser, a performance that surely had former Fed Chairman Jay “Too Little, Too Late” Powell downright jealous.

What did Kevin Warsh say that spooked the markets? Change. Kevin Warsh spoke of how he means to change how the Federal Reserve and the FOMC conduct monetary policy. The Kevin Warsh Federal Reserve will not be a continuation of the Jay Powell Federal Reserve.

That was enough to spook the markets and trigger a selloff in equities, while Treasury yields spiked.

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Whisky Tango Foxtrot

Wall Street has for weeks presumed that the FOMC would stand pat on the federal funds rate, with CME Group’s FedWatch pricing tool putting the probability of no change very near 100%.

It is not hard to see the logic in this. With consumer price inflation heating up, and with producer prices signalling a few more months at least of higher inflation, traditional Fed thinking would lean towards either no change in the federal funds rate, or possibly a rate hike.

Blame Iran for closing the Strait of Hormuz. Blame President Trump for launching a war with Iran over their nuclear weapons program. Regardless of how one frames the oil price and supply shock emanating from the disruption of Persian Gulf oil flows, the reality remains the same: elevated energy price inflation, greater energy price volatility, and a finite capacity of leading industrial nations to buffer the shock with releases from strategic petroleum reserves.

All this has been known for some time, as has the Fed’s traditional policy playbook for such a scenario.

Yet the Fed caught Wall Street off guard even with the policy press release ahead of the post-FOMC press conference, as the first market hiccup of the day showed.

Wall Street’s comfort level with Kevin Warsh did not get any better during the press briefing itself, and by the end of the briefing the Dow had shed close to 600 points, with the S&P 500 and NASDAQ following close behind.

Treasury yields confirmed Wall Street’s shock and dismay, with the 10-Year Treasury jumping almost 10bps between the FOMC press release and the conclusion of the press briefing.

Even while meeting expectations on rates, the Kevin Warsh Federal Reserve succeeded in giving Wall Street a minor “Whisky Tango Foxtrot” moment.

What was the change that spooked Wall Street? While the rate decision was as expected, the tone of the announcement, as well as Warsh’s demeanor during the press conference, were noticeably different: more focused, more disciplined, and perhaps even more confident than had been the norm during Powell’s tenure as Fed Chair.

Less Fed Guidance, More Market Involvement

Warsh lost no time in signalling the start of a new era in Fed policy communications. The FOMC statement announcing the federal funds rate would remain unchanged was barely half a page.

FOMC statement June 17 2026

224KB ∙ PDF file

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April’s statement announcing the same policy decision was over a page in length.

FOMC statement April 29 2026

177KB ∙ PDF file

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Gone was the padding of reassurances that the FOMC really does mean to follow the data and get consumer price inflation down to 2% year on year. Gone was the fluff about what the data presumably showed.

What remained was a simple statement of the policy decision and a few perfunctory sentences on inflation and job growth.

When Warsh began the press briefing a short time later, he wasted no time before announcing significant changes in how the Federal Reserve and the FOMC intended to communicate monetary policy, beginning with how the FOMC rate announcement was likely to be different going forward.

My Fed colleagues and I will be working in close collaboration to ask what changes might improve the conduct of monetary policy.

On that score, you might have already noticed something, a difference in today’s policy statement. It’s a bit shorter, a bit simpler, and it dispenses with some older language. That statement just gives you the facts as best we can judge it. Absent also is so-called forward guidance which we agreed was not well suited to the current policy conjuncture.

This afternoon you also received the usual summary of economic projections. It’s been the practice of this committee for participants to submit these projections and I have encouraged my colleagues to continue to do so. I, however, have refrained from offering any projections of my own, consistent with my long-held views on the SEP, at least as currently structured.

Without missing a beat, Warsh went on to announce a set of task forces to overhaul Federal Reserve communications practices and data management.

I’m appointing a task force in each of five areas that are central to the broad conduct of monetary policy: First, Fed Communications; Second, the Fed’s balance sheet; Third, our use and reliance on existing data sources; Fourth, productivity and jobs in an era of transformation; And last, the Fed’s inflation frameworks.

These subjects are timely, consequential, and in my view worthy of a fresh look. My colleagues and I discussed them with energy and purpose over the last couple of days.

For each of these independent task forces, I’m enlisting some of the very best minds, both inside and outside the economics profession. They will be supported by subject matter specialists from our superb Fed staff.

And they’ll have a straightforward charge: Start with first principles. Ask hard questions. Examine current practice. Consider alternatives. and ultimately propose next steps for policymaker consideration.

With short, succinct sentences in a crisp staccato delivery, Kevin Warsh made it clear that the Fed was going to be handling its brief differently going forward.

Perhaps the most notable point Warsh made during the press briefing was in his rationale for doing away with the previous Fed practice of giving “forward guidance”—a sense of where the Fed anticipated monetary policy going next. Fundamentally, Warsh wants to see the markets playing a greater role in driving interest rates than Federal Reserve policy.

Edward Lawrence with Fox Business. So if you don’t give a lot of ongoing forward guidance, won’t the markets have more volatility and shouldn’t Americans have more access into what you’re thinking going forward?

Kevin Warsh: So I think financial markets perform best when they react to incoming data. I think the financial markets work less efficiently when they ask a question, how will the Federal Reserve react to that incoming information? The more that markets are paying attention to what’s happening in the real economy, deciding what’s good data and what’s less good data, the more financial markets can price what they believe is the most likely and what are the tail risks. Financial market prices are probably the most important source of information to guide central bankers.

But when all the financial markets are doing is reflecting back what we’ve said then we’re taking the most important source of information and we’re being blind to it. I’d like us to create a system where those blinders come off where markets are following data that they efficiently think is reliable and they’ll come with better information through market prices to us we can make more informed decisions with ultimately the goal that I set at the outset, deliver on the price stability objective that Congress told us to do and that we better get in the business of doing.

Without directly criticizing his predecessor, Warsh made it clear that the policy of the Federal Reserve telling Wall Street where interest rates were going to go had the unhelpful consequence of turning Wall Street into little more than a policy echo chamber, where Wall Street was merely sending back at the Fed the outcomes the Fed said were desired through its forward guidance on interest rates.

Warsh wants Wall Street to do its own research, look at its own data, and drive its own conclusions on interest rates. In the short term this may mean greater volatility for both Treasuries and equities, but the end result will be Wall Street giving the Federal Reserve higher quality information on which to base future interest rate decisions.

Warsh quite plainly means to turn Wall Street from a consumer of economic data into a source for the Fed of economic data.

A New Day Has Dawned

Whether Kevin Warsh will turn out to be a good Federal Reserve Chairman or a poor one is a question we will see answered only gradually over the course of the next several months. One part of that answer has already been given, however, and that is how he intends to change the status quo at the Fed.

Warsh undoubtedly appeased the more hawkish Fed watchers by not pushing to lower the federal funds rate, even though President Trump has been consistently vocal about the need for exactly that. He will no doubt go up in the estimation of some if, some time during the summer, the FOMC elects to raise the federal funds rate by 25bps-50bps.

Warsh clearly unnerved much of Wall Street with his remarks. Without regard to how much independence Warsh intends to have from President Trump, he made it clear he will also be independent from Congress and Wall Street. He will steer monetary policy where he thinks it should go, and that may not be where Trump, Congress, or Wall Street think it should go.

A new day has dawned at the Federal Reserve, or so Kevin Warsh wants people to believe. If Warsh accomplishes his vision the Fed will provide less data but hopefully more information using higher quality data.

Whether that ends well for the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate of price stability and full employment is another question we will see answered only gradually over the course of the next several months.

This much is certain: the Federal Reserve will not be as it was.

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