What’s wrong with President Trump? He has endorsed Lindsey Graham’s sister to replace him in the U.S. Senate. The woman stands for “affordability and health care.” She could just as easily be a Democrat. We have no clue what she’d stand for in office, but he promises she’ll never let us down. And then there’s Iran. We all know we have to finish the job with massively superior firepower. Why postpone the inevitable?
And not one successful indictment of an American traitor despite all the evidence against Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and many high profile others. I hesitate to criticize a man — the only man — who has displayed the courage to expose what’s wrong with America.
But the truth is the truth: we are not winning. The clock is ticking, and the nastiest totalitarians in history are coming for America in the form of the Democratic Party if it returns to power.
How the government drove out the science of risk from the entire business of consumer pricing of health care insurance.
In the movie Paddington, a bear moves in with a London family. The father of the house is an insurance actuary. As the bear is bathing, he places a panicked call to his home insurer to add a provision in his policy for the presence of a bear.
The movie has fun with the trope that actuaries are boring, nerdy, and maniacally focused on discerning and pricing risk in multivariate settings. We laugh but they are essential to our lives.
Let’s explore this as it pertains to health.
For years now, there has been a huge question on the part of many. Should you get the mRNA shots and boosters? How many? Or do their risks outweigh their potential benefits?
The answer, if there is any chance that they accomplish the good that the CDC promises, obviously depends on demographics. But where is the cutoff and what are the relative risks?
To answer the question, we go to experts, presumably not those who have failed us so miserably for years now. We find others, but even here we discover debate, studies, uncertainties of data, and various interpretations of that data. Everyone is shouting at each other.
What precisely are the costs of being wrong in the decision? For the individual, they are high. For everyone else, the answer doesn’t matter much. The pharmaceutical companies don’t pay a price. They are indemnified against liability, an egregious privilege that has ruined all incentives to produce working products. Nor do the insurers. They are going to get their beloved premiums regardless of the risks that individuals take.
That means, essentially, people are flying blind on this crucially important topic. And it is hardly the only one.
What is the best diet for health? Some people push the Mediterranean diet and others the Blue Zone. Some people say we should eat vastly more meat and others say vastly less or none. Some people say down with seed oils and others say the risks are exaggerated.
Then there are the fad diets: carrots, blueberries, pumpernickel bread, or whatever. And treatments: some people swear by allopathic regulars and others insist that traditional Chinese, chiropractic, or homeopathic medicine has a lot to offer. Who’s to say?
Or what about the costs of obesity? Some people say it is devastating and is the underlying issue in the huge increase in heart disease while others say this is just aesthetic discrimination. What are the risks vs benefits of the new weight-loss drugs originally developed for diabetes? Everyone argues about this problem but we lack actionable data that could make itself known in insurance premiums.
Even issues like vaping and drinking wine are affected here, with some people saying these are harmless and others swearing that they are far more dangerous than is usually admitted.
These debates affect truly everything from birthing strategies to vaccines themselves. Multitudes have lost trust in experts from on high but hardly anyone knows where to turn to otherwise. And this becomes massively important with crucial decisions like cancer. If you get the diagnosis, you find yourself in an epistemic void.
Or take a simple example: masks. Fauci said we should not wear masks. Then he said we should wear them. Then he said we should wear two masks. He said that this reduces risk. Other people said that this was ridiculous. There is simply no science behind the claim.
Well, who was right? It was some experts over other experts and the rest of us were left to do Internet searches.
This is ridiculous. There is an active industry wholly dedicated to risk assessment. It has professional credentialing, a dedication to facts, a broadness of mind to include as many relevant factors as possible. They could have told us the answer had they been assigned to the case. Tragically, they were not assigned to the case so we ended up having millions and billions of people easily manipulated by a quack doctor in the pay of the panic industry.
In truth, we know far less than we ought to know about any of these issues. Why? Here is the fundamental reason. The actuaries have been disempowered in the health care industry as it directly affects consumers.They were silenced in 1996 with HIPAA legislation that said actuarial tables could no longer impact premiums in group insurance plans. Then in 2010, Obamacare got rid of them completely from individual plans.
No longer was the science of risk part of premium assessment so far as individual premiums are concerned. Actuaries are still active within the industry; the premiums come from somewhere. But their data is not permitted to affect the pricing of plans based on particular risks of individuals and their health decisions.
This whole disaster was promoted in the name of getting rid of discrimination against pre-existing conditions. But this was just the rhetoric. What this did in fact was drive out the science of risk from the entire business of consumer pricing of health care insurance. That’s why we are at such a loss even to discover known facts.
Actuaries specialize in assessing the probabilities of outcomes given an existing set of facts. The risk of those outcomes are priced and weighed against premiums. There are many beautiful features of the profession but one of them is the role of causation, the most difficult problem in all sciences: they are far less concerned about that conundrum than the raw facts. As a consequence, the resulting formulas are constantly changing in light of new data and then the new reality is conveyed to consumers in terms of risk.
Let’s say there is a high incidence of cancer near a lithium mine and that starts to impact on health care costs. In an actuarially informed market, this reality might be reflected in risk premiums.
But let’s say another provider doubts there is any real causal connection and declines to price that risk. Consumers are in a position to decide, and the course of events reveals who made the better guess. They don’t have to wait for randomized controlled trials or otherwise infer causality based on data. They compete to see who has the best theory based on a given set of facts.
There is no longer an industry publicly active in health care that examines such questions and prices plans based on what they know. They are still active in auto, home, fire, and life. There are at least 50,000 certified actuaries who examine facts and adjust premiums based on behavior or demographics. That’s why we have smoke alarms in our houses and why white cars are more popular than black cars. The insurers tell us, through the price system, and not through force, that which increases and reduces risk.
We know for sure, for example, that driving safely lowers accident risk. That’s why a bad driving record will increase your premiums. And therefore you also have a strong financial incentive for driving safely and getting fewer tickets. It’s right there in the pricing structure. You don’t need anyone hectoring you constantly to drive safely. The incentive to do so is built into the price system.
The actuaries also know for sure that young men are at greater risk for accidents than older women. This is not invidious “discrimination.” It’s just what the facts say and everyone recognizes it. It is merely the exercise of economic rationality. It’s what the risk premiums adjusted for markets make clear.
Here’s one: premiums for electric vehicle insurance are typically 25 percent higher than for internal combustion cars. The reason is the higher price for the car, higher repair bills, the extreme risk of battery replacements, and the low resale value. This discourages buyers and rightly so.
If someone says that EVs are safer and more affordable than gas cars, we have the facts on the ground to prove otherwise. If that were true, the insurance would be lower. You might buy an EV if only to save on insurance costs.
Imagine if car insurance were governed by HIPAA or Obamacare. There is simply no way we would know this. People would argue back and forth about it, with some experts shouting down others. With a real market for car insurance, no one needs to shout. We only need to read the price tags.
This is not true in personal health management. There is so much we as consumers do not know. What are the risks of vaccines vs. actually acquiring natural immunity for, for example, chicken pox? There are debates and arguments but no clear way to discern the answer in concrete terms.
Or consider another controversy: breastfeeding vs. bottle feeding and the risk of breast cancer? Or what about birth control and depression? Is there a link?
People tear each other apart over such debates but we have no agreement on facts on the ground to make a clear assessment. If the actuaries were part of the mix, and their data could affect what we pay and therefore what we do, we would have greater clarity.
What about weight-reduction surgeries? Or let’s get really dicey: what about gender-based reconstruction surgery and the risks thereof? Some people say that not granting “gender-affirming care” leads to suicide while others say that cutting a person up when he or she is young leads to a lifetime of regret.
These are the kinds of questions that scientific risk assessment could answer as the data unfolds in real time. If gender surgery leads to vastly higher insurance premiums – and do you really doubt it? – you would have your answer. That way the costs would obtain a rational assessment. Otherwise we are just guessing.
People say we should be taking more vitamin D and eating less surgery desserts and that’s probably right. But how much? There is surely real-time data we could obtain outside randomized controlled trials. We are in fact surrounded by cases that could be closely examined based on experience with premiums adjusted as facts come in. But because of huge interventions, such an industry that informs market pricing based on individual choice doesn’t exist.
I was speaking to some professional actuaries about this whole issue and raised the problem of lying. For example, people are notorious for lying about how much they drink. What does the industry do about this? His answer came quickly: if accurate reporting impacts the profitability of the risk, the policyholder would have every incentive to submit to regular proof tests of various sorts. If he or she didn’t want to do that, he or she would pay for the difference.
See how this works? With a developed enough industry, we would come to know the price of everything. We would know how much a trip to the gym saves us, how much that extra cocktail costs us, how much we are really paying for that double chocolate cake, and how much that bong hit will affect our premiums.
We’ll know how many miles we should be walking, how much tennis to play, and how much weight we need to lose. We’ll even know arcane things like: is boxing or fencing good for health enough to lower our premiums or so dangerous that they raise our premiums? Right now, we do not know. With an actual functioning market, we would know, or at least we would have a window into what real-world experience suggests.
The power is absolutely not to sanction another group of experts. The point is to gather information so that we can make more rational judgments with the best-possible understanding of risks.
Guess who doesn’t want such a market? The pharmaceutical industry. They want us to take a maximum amount of drugs and then more drugs to counteract the ill effects of those drugs and so on. The last thing this industry wants is a signaling system that says: stop taking these products because they are increasing the risk of ill health! They would fight tooth and nail against such a truth-telling system.
Without any pricing information for any of these questions, we are all merely groping around in the dark for answers, like Soviet central planners trying to maximize production but having no rational understanding for how best to do so. We are trying to gain health but still failing and this is for a very obvious reason.
After all, obesity in America went from 23 percent to 45 percent after we lost the ability to rationally price risk. This should not be a surprise! This is exactly what you would expect.
It’s not just that “non-discrimination” reduces the will to health, which it certainly does. It also denies us reliable information for figuring out how best to obtain health. This is why every single subject listed above leads to wild arguments and unhinged speculations and gives rise to ridiculous gurus telling us this theory or myth or that theory or lie. Because of legislation, we have actively denied ourselves access to valuable information on how to get healthy and obtain any reward for doing so.
This is especially true in a pandemic. What is the real risk of Disease X? To whom does it pertain? How best to reduce the damage? What kinds of mitigation strategies get the results to minimize the costs to insurers? We knew NONE of this for certain during the last go-round because we have no industry dedicated to discovering this information in any reliable way. We had “the science” but vast amounts of that turned out to be fake. Actuaries have a strong stake in cranking out and pricing true information, even if that involves doing lab tests themselves.
What about “pre-existing” conditions? These should be handled initially through regular welfare programs or, better, through philanthropic interests. The American Cancer Society can provide for patients and so too with other special-interest philanthropies. In addition, catastrophic risk can be priced into insurance too, same as any other risk, and policies offered for that as well. The premium would be adjusted based on behavior and demographics.
There will never be serious healthcare reform in this country until legislators take on this crucially important topic. And until they do, we will continue to have a completely irrational system that lies to us, disincentivizes healthy living, and fails to reward people for health or even explains the fact on how best to obtain it.
Emancipating the actuarial scientists and letting them speak to the issue of health care insurance premiums might sound like a technical fix to what is a system-wide problem. It’s certainly not a panacea. In healthcare today, corruption is rampant. The journals, the universities, the regulators, the distributors, and the media are all captured and part of a racket that is deeply embedded in all operations. Even this suggestion is highly contingent on other reforms, at the minimum disconnecting individual plans from employer control. And that’s just the start.
Still, it is undeniable that the real catastrophe has been the leveling out of premiums and the elimination of risk assessment associated with them. That system is a proven failure and it has led to disaster. It needs to be ended immediately and replaced by a system that gathers and deploys factual information toward a rational and more truth-telling system in the interest of everyone.
There is an additional benefit of putting the actuaries to work on pricing individual plans. No longer could the FDA/CDC machine lie to the public. Or if they chose to, we could explose those lies immediately.
The point is not to disable one machine only to put another machine in its place. The purpose here is to make operational the information we have so that we can obtain and act on more of it – verifiable information supplied by industrial players in a competitive environment so that health care can begin to operate like a normal market player.
This simply cannot happen without viable actuarial data that can inform pricing systems that account for real-world risk.
The observations above are hardly novel. They are rooted in three core insights about the signaling function of market institutions and pricing in particular.
The economic calculation problem was identified by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 with his famed article on the issue. In it, he presciently predicted that any attempt by a state to abolish or otherwise collectivize capital would render accounting meaningless and thus lead to a tremendous overutilization of resources. That is precisely what has happened to American healthcare, in which trillions and trillions are thrown at a problem that keeps getting worse.
The knowledge problem was singled out by F.A. Hayek in his famed article from 1945. The collectivization of resources, he argued, would blind all producers and consumers to information they need to navigate a constantly changing economic terrain, knowledge that can only be revealed through a process of ongoing discovery. The use of knowledge in health care is of extreme importance, given that the best plan of action is “not given to anyone in its totality.” It can only be revealed in the course of real-world choice.
The third problem is the incentive problem, explained by countless observers for centuries. If there is no financial penalty at all for ill health – indeed if the reward runs entirely in the opposite direction especially for suppliers – we can expect more of it and less of what it is we are seeking to obtain. Subsidize something and get more of it: this is a fact of the way the world works. And the opposite is true: all else equal, a higher price reduces the quantity demanded.
Ill health has not only been subsidized. The truth about its cause and its solution has been suppressed because of legislation that mandates that everyone be treated the same regardless of risk. This is not a real market but a fake one, even if most of the main players are nominally working in the private sector. Otherwise there is no real functioning market at all. This is a sector dominated by corporatists and not market structures.
There are myriad issues in healthcare that are crying out for reform. The large and mandated benefits packages serve no purpose for most people. The whole system of employer-provided plans increases the costs of switching jobs and embroils enterprises in a system that should not involve them. The regulations of the industry are extreme with the regulatory agencies captured by the biggest industrial players. The indemnification of pharma against liability for harm is contrary to all justice.
All of this is true. But it is also true that health insurance needs a new pricing structure that is not based on a one-size-fits-all model that it is now. Health and therefore healthcare expenses are highly tuned to individual choice. We need more information about the best choices, and that information can only come to us once the specialists who know the data are allowed to impact pricing structures in ways they currently cannot.
Is it too much to ask that health insurance take a cue from automotive insurance, rewarding people for better behavior and charging more for great risk? It would not seem so. Such a reform would at least be a step in the right direction.
To return to our opening example of Paddington bear, having that guy in your house surely does increase the risk of accidents. We might love that bear so much that we are happy to pay the differential but it is good to know how much the decision is going to cost us. Otherwise we are just flying blind
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, including Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. Follow him at @jeffreyatucker .
The Los Angeles Times recently published a “News Analysis” headlined: “Trump, long a critic of ‘forever wars,’ may be stumbling into one with Iran.”
The analysis offers legitimate grounds for criticizing President Donald Trump. He has described the objectives of the war against Iran in different ways. He has made changing predictions about its duration. He has repeatedly suggested that an agreement was near, only for negotiations to collapse. He promised no more endless Middle East wars, yet the conflict has continued for months, American servicemembers have died, and the administration has not clearly defined what victory looks like.
All fair questions. But the article omits the most important question of all: Why did the war begin?
Similarly, recent analyses in Time, The Washington Post and Politico raise many of the same objections. Yet, here, too, none address the threshold question: Was Iran close to obtaining a nuclear weapon—and if so, how close?
Trump, from the beginning of the war, said the primary purpose was to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte publicly agreed with Trump and said Iran was close to acquiring a nuclear and ballistic-missile capability “which is posing a threat not only to the region, the Middle East, including posing an existential threat to Israel, it is also posing a huge threat to us here in Europe.”
Was that assessment correct?
The Times quotes three experts who explain why Trump may be “stumbling” into a “forever war.” Yet the article does not ask any of them whether Iran was close to producing a nuclear weapon. It does not ask what Iran might have done with one. And it does not ask what they would have proposed to prevent it.
Suppose Iran was nowhere near a bomb. Suppose its nuclear program posed no imminent danger and could have been contained indefinitely through inspections, sanctions and negotiations. In that case, Trump’s decision to use military force becomes far harder, if not impossible, to defend.
But suppose Trump and Rutte were right. Suppose Iran was approaching the point at which it could produce a nuclear weapon along with increasingly capable missiles. It could intimidate its neighbors, protect its terrorist proxies and trigger a regional nuclear-arms race.
That would not automatically prove that every Trump decision was wise. It would not excuse shifting explanations, unrealistic timelines, failed ceasefires or poor planning, if that was the case. But it would establish that the president did not simply awaken one morning and decide he felt like bombing a country. It would establish that he took action when previous presidents chose not to—an action no other country on earth was willing or able to undertake.
Americans cannot intelligently judge this war when major news organizations discuss its costs while barely mentioning the danger it was intended to prevent.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed recently denounced “a war we should have never started.” Yet the interviewer never asked: Was Iran close to a nuclear weapon? If not, what evidence disproves that claim? If so, what would you have done about it, if anything?
Sanctions? Iran endured them for years.
Negotiations? Iranian negotiators broke the memorandum of understanding before the ink was dry.
Inspections? Those work only when inspectors receive genuine access without notice and only if Iran allows the inspectors to inspect.
Containment? That means accepting the risk that the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism remains determined to acquire a nuclear weapon while hoping deterrence works forever.
That is what serious analysis looks like.
Critics may conclude that military action was unnecessary, disproportionate or counterproductive. But they must confront the alternative. What was the likelihood that Iran would obtain a bomb? How soon? What would the consequences have been if and when Iran achieved this objective? And what nonmilitary policy had a realistic chance of stopping it?
An analysis that calls the conflict a potential forever war, while refusing to analyze the threat that caused the war, is not analysis. It is a prosecution brief.
The public deserves scrutiny of Trump’s inconsistencies, predictions and strategy. But it also deserves scrutiny of Iran’s nuclear progress, intentions and capabilities. This is not too much to ask from a “news analysis.”
Sometimes you just have to write what you know and document what you’ve seen, heard, and metabolized to remind yourself that, no, you haven’t gone crazy.
Perhaps by spelling it all out and publishing it, the masses might begin to grasp the breadth and scope of a problem they’ve been led to believe is an overblown, remote issue. Tenacious journalist that I am, I’ll provide ample receipts proving that the exact opposite is true.
Allow me to show you what life in the trans trench has been like for the past decade, with a combination of personal story and indisputable, brute facts. This is the tip of the iceberg, a mere fraction of the filth.
Probably eight years ago, I remember seeing for the first time a series of images that are burned into my memory. They say a picture says a thousand words, but in the trans trench, they are the beginning of a kind of trauma — the jarring introduction to a bestial type of Hell you never knew existed. Writing in Corinth with a front-row seat to all kinds of debauchery, the Apostle Paul noted in Romans 1 how wicked people “invent new ways of doing evil” (Romans 1:30). The trans scourge is that. On steroids, literally.
The first image I saw was a blue-haired, bare-chested girl who looked like she might be all of 14 years old. Scars were where her breasts used to be. She had the most tormented, vacant eyes.
It took me aback, and I gasped repeatedly. I stood up from my desk and walked away, feeling as though I’d been violated at a deep level, like a sledgehammer to the gut. I told a friend that it felt like I had involuntarily looked at sexually violent fetish porn featuring a minor child. That friend replied, “Brandon, that is exactly what you saw.”
The second image I saw was when I heard from someone who’d undergone a radial forearm phalloplasty and regretted it. She sent me a picture of her gutted forearm, the harvested tissue from which was used to make a fake penis. Another gut-punch.
Some weeks later, I stumbled upon Miami-based Irish gender surgeon Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher’s Instagram account — some of us refer to her as the “butcher of Louth.” This surgeon was posing next to young people she’d operated on, including a girl who had previous self-harm scars. Around that same time, I remember seeing Canadian gender surgeon Giancarlo McEvenue posing with a Santa hat, holding up two medical waste buckets labeled “breast tissue.” I subsequently saw footage of him speaking at a Johnson & Johnson–sponsored discussion, boasting of his sordid profession. Calling this unmitigated depravity is the understatement of the century.
I also remember interviewing a regretful de-trans man who was castrated, and he told me how he ended up ejaculating blood. I was glad this interview was on the phone and not on a Zoom call because he would have seen me fall out of my chair.
Everyone has their own journey of falling down the gender rabbit hole, and when you find yourself in this particular trench, you soon start meeting all sorts of shocked and disoriented people, astonished that this is real life. It’s a freight train of unimaginable nightmares hurtling down the tracks at a high velocity, bulldozing people right and left.
Those of us who’ve been doing the hard work exposing the madness against an impenetrable mainstream media blockade can all tell you what it’s like to learn about all the horrors, only to be gaslit with flat denials like “that’s not happening.” Then you show concrete proof, and it becomes “well, it’s only a few people,” and then maybe “why are you so obsessed with this small, strange issue?” The whole world is under a reality-denying spell, shrouded in pink and blue flags, and people are programmed with dismissive talking points if anyone suggests that something’s wrong.
We, the trans (and queer) trench dwellers, have seen pedophilic elements of this movement in silicone pediatric penis packers — vile products aimed at girls as young as 4 so that they can “pack” their underwear to give the appearance of a male bulge.
If that wasn’t ghastly enough, we found out how academics and others in internet chat forums were behind the strategic rebranding of “gender identity disorder” to “gender dysphoria” at meetings of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Thanks to the intrepid reporting of Reduxx, which spent several months investigating the Eunuch Archive, we learned that men on that site swap castration-themed written pornography involving the sexual torture of children whose puberty has been stunted. One user on that foul site described watching a trans surgery on a male as “arousing” to watch. These men say “eunuch” is a kind of “gender-diverse” person, by the way, and it’s actually listed in WPATH’s official guidelines.
The trench dwellers also know about the 2016 Dutch medical report that was part of the linchpin study underlying gender surgeries on youth. An 18-year-old in that study had been on puberty blockers, so his genitals hadn’t matured, and surgeons used part of his bowel tissue to fashion a simulacrum of a female sex organ — a laparoscopic intestinal vaginoplasty. Complications followed: E. coli bacteria from his intestine spread through his body, and he died of sepsis. When this came to light, more people started paying attention, especially since Elon Musk had purchased Twitter by then, and photos of the man’s maimed genital area were able to circulate freely online.
We’ve seen pink-haired queer surgeon Blair Peters speak in a podcast interview about using the peritoneum in similarly grotesque surgeries he does on minor boys. We’ve watched Democrat politicians walk out of the room when U.S. Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Florida) tried to show footage of that Peters interview during a House hearing.
We’ve seen all the boundary-breaking madness of garish drag queens reading to children in libraries. We can’t seem to forget this particular pervert that some of us call “rainbow monkey dildo man.”
We’ve seen the 11-year-old “drag kid” performer “Desmond Is Amazing” dance in a gay nightclub while patrons threw dollar bills at him. Elle Magazine platformed another young drag performer, an 8-year-old boy from Canada whose stage name is “Lactatia.”
Speaking of lactation, we’ve watched the disturbing capture of groups like La Leche League and the Centers for Disease Control endorse the feculent phenomenon of “chestfeeding” — trans-identifying males pretending to breastfeed babies. The NHS Trust in the UK even claimed that the drug-induced, hormone-addled discharge that such men secrete was as good as mother’s milk. In 2017, one such man who “chestfed” his daughter wrote in the Seattle alt newspaper The Stranger that the experience was sexually charged and that he “got off” on it, insisting readers not judge him. Yes, it’s as revolting as it sounds; they are using infants like prostitutes to satisfy their sick, twisted fetish.
We’ve seen the FOIA’d progress report document showing how Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy altered a research protocol, lowering the age from 13 to 8 for the cross-sex hormone cohort inclusion criteria in an NIH-funded grant.
We’ve seen the data, from insurance record analyses and medical journal documentation, showing girls as young as 12 and 13 undergoing mastectomies, and boys as young as 15 undergoing genital surgery. We’ve seen the Do No Harm database showing that between 2019 and 2023, nearly 14,000 minors received puberty blockers or hormones, and over 5,700 minors underwent gender surgeries. These are lowball figures, I should note, since some insurance systems are closed to researchers.
Some of us now carry secondary trauma from years of sifting through this diabolical wretchedness. We find ourselves sporadically and inexplicably on the verge of vomiting, our bodies seizing up in panic. Our nervous systems are fried, and our sleep is disturbed. Some of us have family members mired in the gender jungle, and it makes the torment all the more personal.
We are not in the mood to be told that we are right-wing “culture warriors” stoking a moral panic. We are done being told “Just let them pee in peace,” and “Trans kids know who they are,” as we have heard ad nauseam.
No — those of us in the trans trench have been exposed to things at a granular level that we hope you never have to see. We’ll take some of it to our graves. We’ve been harassed, threatened, sent disturbing material by email, and censored on social media for stating basic biology. We can relate to the kind of hostile bilge that Irreversible Damage author Abigail Shrier received from a trans activist. I print it in full so as not to sugarcoat what it has been like: “I’ll slit your f*cking throat and f*ck your newly made neck p*ssy.”
How any of us in the trans trench have remained sane is nothing short of a miracle. Some of us need counseling to process everything we’ve had to absorb, so we can inform the public about the atrocities happening right under our noses.
But instead of accountability, we feel mostly ignored. In a sane world, we would be convening Nuremberg 2.0 tribunals, but we’re watching politicians and major media start to treat this chapter as something to forget and be memory-holed.
We’ve gone through all of this before with Anthropic. Back in April, Anthropic limited the release of its latest model, called Mythos, to major software companies because it was concerned it could do massive damage in the wrong hands.
…rather than make it widely available to Claude users, Anthropic gave 12 tech companies access via Project Glasswing, which it described as “an effort to secure the world’s most critical software”.
They include cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services, device manufacturers Apple, Microsoft and Google, and chip-makers Nvidia and Broadcom…
In a video released alongside Project Glasswing’s launch, Anthropic boss Dario Amodei said it had offered to work with US government officials to “help defend against the risk of these models”.
Anthropic essentially called the cops on itself, asking the federal government to help it decide when the model would be safe to release. And for a time last month, the White House actually did tell them not to allow its use by “any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States.” Anthropic shut it down for two weeks until it was able to convince the Trump administration it was safe.
Now we’re seeing a similar story play out at OpenAI, though arguably this one didn’t go as smoothly. OpenAI revealed today that it’s latest model had hacked into another company without being told to do so.
Artificial intelligence software in testing by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI breached security controls, accessed the internet and hacked another tech firm to obtain answers to questions probing its cybersecurity skills, OpenAI said on Tuesday…
“We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities,” OpenAI said in a blog post Tuesday. The company is working with Hugging Face, the AI company that OpenAI’s system attacked, to determine the full impact of the hack.
OpenAI briefed the Trump administration on the situation before announcing it publicly, according to a person familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic information.
Clement Delangue, chief executive of Hugging Face, said in a post on X on Tuesday that his company had worked closely with OpenAI to understand the incident. “We strongly believe there was no malicious intent on their part. It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!,” he wrote.
What this AI model did is pretty impressive but also a bit worrisome. The plan was to test the new model’s capabilities without all of the safety features included for a final release. OpenAI thought the test was safe but the model found a way out.
This incident occurred during an internal evaluation which prompts models to pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths, in an effort to quantify their cyber capabilities. We estimate maximal cyber capabilities by running this evaluation without production classifiers used to prevent models from pursuing high-risk cyber activity. Our benchmarks run in a highly isolated environment, with network access constrained to the ability to install packages through an internally hosted third-party software that acts as a proxy and cache for package registries.
The models identified and chained vulnerabilities across OpenAI’s research environment and Hugging Face’s production infrastructure to obtain test solutions directly from Hugging Face’s production database. All evidence suggests that the models were hyperfocused on finding a solution for ExploitGym, going to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal.
While operating in our sandboxed testing environment, our models spent a substantial amount of inference compute finding a way to obtain open Internet access, in pursuit of solving the evaluation problem. To gain access, the models identified and exploited a zero-day vulnerability (which we’ve now responsibly disclosed to the vendor) in the package registry cache proxy. With this access, our models performed a series of privilege escalation and lateral movement actions in our research testing environment until the models reached a node with Internet access.
After gaining Internet access, the models inferred that Hugging Face potentially hosted models, datasets and solutions for ExploitGym. Knowing this, the model searched for and successfully found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation.
To sum up, the model hacked its way out to the internet, then realized the answers were inside another company’s private servers and hacked into those servers to get the information it wanted.
So the spin here is that everything is fine and “We are strengthening the containment, monitoring, access controls, and evaluation practices used during model development.” That sounds good. But the conclusion is that, “The incident also makes clear that advanced models can discover and exploit novel attack paths in real-world systems without source-code access.”
And this model wasn’t even told to do any of this. It just seems to have known this would be an easier way to get answers. What could it do if directed to steal some information from a particular government or company? If it was told to cover its own tracks, could it do that?
There are two things to worry about here. One, that our own tools will be used to hack their way into information they aren’t supposed to have. Two, that China is developing the same tools about six months behind us and will have no compunction about using them in this way. Either way, the potential for a lot of disruptions seems to already be on the horizon.
Has Vice President J.D. Vance been sidelined by President Trump over Iran? Right now, it seems that indeed, this might be the case.
Let’s take a look at a brief timeline.
On July 8, President Trump, joined by his Secretaries of War, State and Treasury at the NATO Summit in Ankara, Turkey, publicly ripped up the Vice President’s “Memorandum of Understanding” (MoU) with Iran. He said it agreement was “over.”
“To me, I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them,” Trump told reporters at the Summit. “They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people.”
The President also issued orders for a new series of air attacks on Iran beginning with a wave of 90 U.S. air attacks that day – which continue to this evening.
And exactly where was Vice President J.D Vance on July 8?
He wasn’t at the White House. He wasn’t in the Situation Room monitoring events. Instead, he traveled to Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he delivered a speech about Medicaid and food stamp fraud.
Of course, if he were still engaged in Iran, Vance could have canceled his Milwaukee speech and remain in Washington to interact on both the diplomatic and national security fronts concerning Iran and his now dead MoU.
Vance wasn’t needed there at all. In fact, the administration was well represented in Milwaukee. Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services was speaking at the same event on the same subject.
I believe that when the President decided that he was done with the MoU, he also decided he was through with his Vice President’s input on international affairs.
This is speculation of course. But based on public actions to date, and what I know of how inside Washington works, it appears that for now, Vance is largely out of the loop.
Remember, as a U.S. Senator, Vance had no committee assignments on armed services, intelligence or national security. He never sat on a single committee that dealt with foreign policy or military policy.
But, while Vance might have been sidelined, he really wasn’t done on all things concerning Israel.
On July 14, Politico reported, “Vance postponed earlier plans to address a Tuesday morning House GOP conference meeting, instead traveling to Texas to tape an episode of the Joe Rogan podcast.”
Now Vance was giving the big finger to the House leadership and instead decided it advanced his own interests as he traveled to Austin to appear with Joe Rogan. The podcaster has about 11 million viewers per episode.
In fact, the House Republican conference was confronting very important issues close to the President and could determine the outcome of the mid-term elections.
At that July 14 meeting, they were grappling with legislative efforts to finalize an $95 billion budget resolution, with supplemental requests related to fighting the war in Iran, and the President’s top priority, to pass the SAVE Act, an electoral reform bill to reduce electoral fraud.
In the end, the House did narrowly pass all three pieces of legislation today – but without J.D. Vance’s assistance on July 14.
And then, while on Rogan’s podcast, Vance decided to viciously attack Israel – America’s key ally in the Middle East as well as our wartime ally.
The Vice President claimed that Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 Presidential campaign manager, had committed political treason: he secretly lobbied on behalf of Israel through podcasters.
The Vice President was furious over a Time investigative article that focused on Parscale’s attempt to generate pro-Israel sympathies among conservatives through a digital campaign. Indeed, the contract was awarded to him through Havas, an Israeli-based global ad agency.
Vance lashed out at Israel, telling the podcaster, “When I open up the pages of Time magazine, and I see that there’s a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing, and many of the people who were receiving that money were actually attacking me in completely dishonest ways. You know, my response to that is, well, go to hell.”
But Pascale, in the same Time article categorically denied that his campaign tried to undermine the President of the MoU, or Vance’s ceasefire MoU, telling the magazine, “I have never funded, organized, or participated in any effort to undermine President Trump – ever – including his Memorandum of Understanding or ceasefire proposal.”
The conservative digital expert additionally told Time, “The claim that I am coordinating an effort to prolong the war is completely false. The only people manufacturing a conflict between President Trump, Israel, and me are anonymous officials using background quotes to make me the bogeyman.”
Vance did concede to Rogan that indeed, countries other than Israel do try to influence American public opinion as well as our government. “I wouldn’t say they’re the only effective country trying to influence American politics by any means,” he said.
In fact, according to the U.S. Attorney General’s latest FARA report to Congress, in the last six months of 2024 Islamic nations spent more than $46 million for public relations and lobbying in the United States. Israel, on the other hand, spent only $1.5 million in lobbying and public relations, according to FARA. If you add Pascale’s 2025 contract, you can add $4 million more.
According to Open Secrets, an American nonprofit that has long tracked lobbying and public relations by foreign governments, Qatar alone spent over $240 million on FARA-registered lobbying and public relations in the US since 2015. “This includes efforts through firms influencing policy, media, and academia. In 2024 alone, expenditures exceeded $30 million, dwarfing many other foreign entities while advancing Doha’s interests amid regional tensions,” the investigative nonprofit reported.
Vance’s hostility towards Israel appears to be part of an emerging plan by the Vice President to run against Israel in the 2028 Presidential election. In this regard, he’s aligning himself with Tucker Carlson and other conservative voices that are openly anti-Israel.
The only good news is, perhaps, President Trump has lost trust in Vance as his international point person on Iran. If indeed he is sidelining him, that would be good news.
But there are many chapters to be written about the war against Iran. Who knows if Vance will be resurrected within White House national security circles? And will the Vice President be asked against to serve as the President’s lead negotiator with Iran?
Leftist women show a striking tolerance for infidelity that sets them apart from their conservative counterparts.
In 2022, a groundbreaking poll was conducted by the Survey Center on American Life. Later, it was analyzed by the Institute for Family Studies. Only 36 percent of liberal women say it is “always wrong” for a woman to have an extramarital affair. That compares to 71 percent of conservative women who condemn infidelity outright. Even more telling, these same liberal women apply a blatant double standard: they are far more lenient toward female cheating than male cheating.
This is not nuance. It is a moral loophole that excuses betrayal when it suits lefty women.
General Social Survey data spanning nearly three decades confirms that the behavior matches the attitude. Liberals, including women, report significantly higher rates of extramarital sex than conservatives, even after accounting for age, income, education, and other factors. Liberals were nearly twice as likely to admit infidelity. These patterns reveal a worldview that treats personal commitments as flexible and conditional rather than ironclad.
This moral flexibility collides with another hard reality: leftist women have turned politics into a non-negotiable dealbreaker in dating.
Pew Research Center data from 2020 showed something stark. Seventy-one percent of single Democrats and Democratic-leaning women said they probably or definitely would not date someone who voted for Donald Trump. The 2023 American Perspectives Survey reinforced this, finding most committed partisans on the left reject partners from the opposing side far more aggressively than in past generations.
For non-leftist men living in deep-blue cities, metros, and states, the pool of compatible women shrinks dramatically. Young women in those areas lean heavily left-wing and they filter ruthlessly for ideological alignment.
In a not so surprising move, the European Commission has formally refused to register the anti-immigration ‘Save Europe Act’ as a European Citizens’ Initiative, meaning its organisers cannot begin collecting the one million validated signatures required to put the proposal formally before Brussels. The Commission argues that the proposal is incompatible with the European Union’s “fundamental values” and anti-discrimination rules.
Dutch right-wing activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek, one of the campaign organisers, called the decision unacceptable and said the campaign would challenge the decision in court.
The Save Europe Act campaign, led by Vlaardingerbroek and Austrian identitarian activist Martin Sellner, has attracted significant support across Europe, with almost 600,000 signatures.
The Act’s main demands are a halt to non-European immigration—both legal and illegal—and the creation of a Europe-wide remigration system. The charter also calls for the removal of “social welfare incentives and benefits that function as pull factors for migration.”
Under the rules governing European Citizens’ Initiatives, campaigns must collect at least one million validated signatures from citizens across a minimum of seven EU member states before the Commission is required to consider them.
However, the Commission announced on Wednesday, July 22nd that the call for a temporary moratorium on new non-Western immigration channels, based on protecting the ethnic and cultural continuity of Europe’s native peoples, would constitute discrimination on the grounds of race and ethnic origin.
It said the proposed criteria would be “manifestly contrary” to the “values” set out in the Treaties of the European Union and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.
Responding to the Commission’s decision, Vlaardingerbroek accused Brussels of attempting to silence hundreds of thousands of Europeans. She announced that the organisers will take legal action against the Commission and continue gathering signatures.
With the Save Europe Act, we have asked for a halt on non-Western immigration. Now, the European Commission is saying that that is racist and that it goes against the non-discrimination principle. And that’s not all. They are also saying that wanting to preserve your national identity can only happen within the framework of European values. And who gets to decide what those European values are? Well, apparently, the Commission does.
Several politicians from the Patriots for Europe political family also condemned the Commission’s decision. Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) MEP Petra Steger described the rejection as hypocritical: “When Brussels obstructs democratic citizens’ initiatives simply because it doesn’t like the demands, it’s no longer about values—it’s only about their reckless ideology.”
Spanish VOX MEP Hermann Tertsch accused Brussels of applying ideological double standards: “The European Commission only recognizes the NGOs of the far left, associations supporting immigrant traffickers, Greta-style eco-fanatic lunatics, and franchises of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Brussels’ hostile attitude to the Save Europe Act was on full display last week, when the Mayor of Brussels attempted to ban a rally organised by the campaigners outside the European Parliament. The organisers successfully overturned the decision in court and symbolically delivered more than half a million signatures to Parliament.
A Baptist pastor in Virginia has allegedly confessed to sending more than a dozen sexual images to a teenage boy, according to court documents.
Kenny Baldwin, 46, has been the lead pastor of Crossroads Baptist Church since 2011. Earlier this week, he was charged with 13 counts related to sending naked pictures of himself to a teenage boy. The two met while Baldwin came to the young man’s church to give a sermon and the two exchanged phone numbers afterwards. ABC27 reports:
“According to court documents, Baldwin had confessed to two different people, who then reported the confession to Troopers. When Baldwin was interviewed on June 12 at the Pennsylvania State Police York station, he allegedly admitted to sending the pictures.
Baldwin faces 13 charges that include felony counts of unlawful contact with a minor and corruption of minors, and misdemeanor counts of indecent exposure, open lewdness and corruption of minors.”
Baldwin is married and has 5 children. He was released on an $80,000 bail, with a preliminary hearing occurring on Aug 10.
The US and Saudi Arabia are expected to announce a deal that will allow the Gulf kingdom to develop a civilian nuclear programme.
An announcement is expected from US President Donald Trump’s administration on Wednesday, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.
The agreement could be worth billions of dollars to the US, whose companies could be involved in building a facility to produce enriched uranium, which can be used as fuel for power plants but also to make nuclear bombs.
Nuclear experts and former officials in Israel – the US’s top ally in the Middle East – have voiced concern that the plan could ultimately lead to Saudi Arabia being able to develop a nuclear weapon.
The BBC has asked the White House for comment.
The deal would allow U.S. companies to run nuclear power for the Saudis on Saudi soil, CBS reported citing a regional official familiar with the agreement. The corporations involved have not been disclosed and Congress would need to be consulted.
After undertaking a joint study with the US, Saudi Arabia may be allowed to enrich uranium on its soil to produce fuel at a US-built enrichment facility, instead of relying on imported fuel, according to media reports.
The enrichment provision would distinguish this agreement from another one that was struck by the US in 2009 with Saudi Arabia’s neighbour, the United Arab Emirates, under which the UAE does not produce its own fuel and accepts a host of other restrictions.
For that reason, the agreement is also expected to attract the concern of nuclear non-proliferation campaigners, whose ultimate aim is to prevent an increase in the number of nuclear weapons worldwide.
The nuclear issue has been at the centre of the months-long US-Israeli conflict with Iran. The two nations say one of the reasons they attacked Iran in February was to prevent the country from ever developing a nuclear weapon – something that Tehran denies planning to do.
Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, told CBS News in 2018 that his own nation was not planning to acquire a nuclear weapon, but that “without a doubt if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible”.
The US-Saudi deal due to be unveiled on Wednesday has already been approved by Trump and will last 30 years, according to The Wall Street Journal.
If the US objects to enrichment taking place in Saudi Arabia following the joint study, the kingdom would not be allowed to do so on its own or with another foreign partner for 10 years, the newspaper says.
The plan will now be sent to the US Congress. Some lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle are also expected to oppose the deal, though Trump’s Republican Party controls both the upper and lower chambers.
The US-Saudi deal has not been made contingent on the Saudis normalising diplomatic ties with Israel, the New York Times reports. The push for Saudi-Israeli normalisation has been an aspiration of successive US presidents.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 