May 3, 2026

x02a1 Global Outlook

The U.S. House has passed partial funding of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), sending the bill to the President for an expected signing. The passage ends the 76 days of DHS shutdown.

Congress ends record-shattering DHS shutdown – Politico

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EXCERPT:

On the 76th day since Department of Homeland Security funding lapsed, Congress passed a bill Thursday restoring the flow of federal dollars to most of its agencies — without solving any of the policy disagreements that led to the record-breaking shutdown.

The House approved by voice vote the partial DHS funding measure the Senate passed more than a month ago. President Donald Trump is expected to swiftly sign the bipartisan legislation, fully funding the Coast Guard, TSA, Secret Service, FEMA and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, along with other offices within DHS that don’t deal with immigration enforcement.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia is claiming he has warned Trump of “extremely harmful consequences” if the U.S renews attacks on Iran. The public declaration puts Russia’s power reputation with its allies on the line should the U.S. attack and not suffer “extremely harmful consequences.”

Putin issues ‘extreme consequences’ warning to Trump on Iran www.mirror.co.uk
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EXCERPT:

Vladimir Putin has reportedly warned Donald Trump that there will be “extremely harmful consequences” if the US attacks Iran again, as the pair reportedly discussed a potential Ukraine ceasefire in a 90-minute call.

Vladimir Putin has issued a warning to Donald Trump that there will be “extremely harmful consequences” should the US launch further attacks on Iran, according to reports.

It came as the two leaders discussed the Iran conflict and floated a temporary ceasefire in Ukraine during a 90-minute telephone conversation on Wednesday.

Public School Teachers Unions have contributed more than $1 billion to progressive organizations, causes, and candidacies in the last 10 years alone. The two heaviest hitters are the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), who combined to account for $669 million alone. This means progressives could count on teachers’ unions to give them $100 million a year for the last 10 years.

Teachers Unions Have Funneled More Than $1 Billion to Left-Wing Causes › American Greatness amgreatness.com
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EXCERPT:

A report from Defending Education says teachers unions across the nation have quietly spent more than $1 billion in member dues on political activism and left-wing causes over the past decade.

Breitbart reports that two national teachers’ unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), spent a combined $669 million over the past ten years.

The figure skyrockets to over $1 billion in total political spending when state and local affiliates are included, showing a growing emphasis on activism rather than education.

The United Arab Emirates is officially separating from the OPEC alliance. They declared, “During our time in the organisation, we made significant contributions and even greater sacrifices for the benefit of all. However, the time has come to focus our efforts on what our national interest dictates and our commitment to our investors, customers, partners and global energy markets. This is what we will focus on going forward.”

United Arab Emirates quits OPEC alliance www.washingtonexaminer.com
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EXCERPT:

The United Arab Emirates on Tuesday said it is exiting OPEC and the broader OPEC+ as of May 1, marking a major loss for the oil producing bloc as global energy markets remain volatile in light of the Iran war.

The UAE said it has participated in the organization for the greater global benefit, but it is leaving the group to focus on internal interests.

President Trump has rejected the latest proposal by Iran to continue the ceasefire, which seems to be de facto over. The Supreme Leader has allegedly emerged and promised to free the Strait of Hormuz from U.S. presence. The progressive media is casting doubts on U.S. power while Trump’s base buckles in its support for the war.

Iran’s Missing ‘Supreme Leader,’ in Written Message, Vows ‘Future Free of America’ for Strait of Hormuz www.breitbart.com
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EXCERPT:

The alleged, but missing, “supreme leader” of Iran Mojtaba Khamenei reportedly issued a written message on Thursday declaring that his country will impose a “new legal framework and management system for the Strait of Hormuz” that will result in a future “free of America” in the waterway.

Khamenei’s message declared the Strait, in which Iran has for over a month attempted to endanger commercial traffic, a “divine blessing” for his nation that the Islamist terror regime takes seriously. His statement, issued on the occasion of Iran’s “National Persian Gulf Day,” also contained a commitment to continue the regime’s illicit nuclear development — the main issue that the administration of President Donald Trump is seeking to settle with Iran.

The message follows weeks of attempts to end hostilities between Iran and America that began on February 28, when the Pentagon launched Operation Epic Fury and killed Khamenei’s father, longtime brutal dictator Ali Khamenei. President Trump announced a ceasefire this month that was initially intended to last two weeks, but has since been extended indefinitely. In public statements on his website, Truth Social, President Trump has explained that the extension was necessary given the large number of senior leaders in the Iranian regime that have been killed, resulting in unclear leadership and an intense power struggle within the terror state’s government apparatus. Iranian officials have attempted to deny the discord among their ranks but also have not at press time been able to organize a coherent response to the White House’s attempts to construct a long-lasting peace agreement.

The Department of Justice has garnered two new indictments targeting former FBI Director James Comey. The indictments are connected to a social media post by Comey that showed seashells on the beach laid out to signal “86 47.” One charge is “knowingly and willfully making a threat to take the life of — and to inflict bodily harm on — the president.” The second charge is “knowingly and willfully transmitting in interstate commerce a threat to kill the president.”

Comey indicted again on charges stemming from Instagram post www.cbsnews.com
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EXCERPT:

Washington — A federal grand jury indicted former FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday for allegedly making threats against the president, marking the second time he will be prosecuted by President Trump’s Justice Department.

The indictment charges Comey with two counts: knowingly and willfully making a threat to take the life of — and to inflict bodily harm on — the president, and second, knowingly and willfully transmitting in interstate commerce a threat to kill the president. CBS News reported that Comey was facing charges again hours before the indictment was issued.

Using extremely veiled language, Charles III, King of Britian, appeared to tell the U.S. congress Trump should end the war in Iran and stop deportations. Progressives tend to agree with this assessment, claiming Charles “owned” Trump in front of congress.

This is our interpretation after reading between the two clear focal points of his speech, diversity and religious tolerance, both target Trump deportations of immigrants and his war on Islamist Iran.

Here are the key passages that we believe reveal this:

They carried with them and carried forward the great inheritance of the British Enlightenment, as well as the ideals which had an even deeper history in English common law and Magna Carta…

“Distinguished members of the 119th Congress, it is here in these very halls that this spirit of liberty and the promise of America’s founders is present in every session and every vote cast not by the will of one, but by the deliberation of many, representing the living mosaic of the United States in both of our countries.

It is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse and free societies that gives us our collective strength, including to support victims of some of the ills that so tragically exist in both our societies today.”

“And Mr. Speaker, for many here and for myself, the Christian faith is a firm anchor and daily inspiration that guides us not only personally, but together as members of our community. Having devoted a large part of my life to interfaith relationships and greater understanding, it is that faith in the triumph of light over darkness which I have found confirmed countless times.”

“I am mindful that we are still in the season of Easter, the season that most strengthens my hope. It is why I believe with all my heart that the essence of our two nations is a generosity of spirit and a duty to foster compassion, to promote peace, to deepen mutual understanding, and to value all people of all faiths and of none.”

Read the full transcript of King Charles III’s speech to U.S. Congress – National globalnews.ca
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EXCERPT:

King Charles III addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress on Tuesday, where he marked the 250th anniversary of American independence and reaffirmed the “special relationship” between the U.K. and U.S. amid bilateral and global tensions.

Charles, who was in the U.S. for a four-day state visit, is just the second British monarch to address Congress after his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, delivered a similar speech in 1991.

Here is a full transcript of the King’s speech:

Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members of Congress, representatives of the American people across all states, territories, cities and communities.

I would like, if I may, to take this opportunity to express my particular gratitude to you all for the great honour of addressing this joint meeting of Congress, and on behalf of the Queen and myself, to thank the American people for welcoming us to the United States to mark this semi-quincentennial year of the Declaration of Independence.

A California teacher and registered Democrat named Cole Allen appears to have attempted to kill members of the Trump administration, including Trump, at a White House Correspondents Dinner. He was injured in the attack, and so were two secret service agents. The fallout from the shooting has only just begun. The shooting happened at the Wahington D.C. Hilton Hotel.

White House Shooter Manifesto: Would-Be Trump Assassin Was a Radical Anti-Christian Leftist gellerreport.com
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EXCERPT:

Fox News reporter: The shooters manifesto said he wanted to target administration officials.

A bloodbath was averted. The Democrat party should be designated a terrorist organization.

Investigators also found extensive anti-Trump and anti-Christian rhetoric across his social media accounts.

AI is now bigger than oil and gas in terms of capital investment, having topped $400 billion. It is also the largest debt-segment within U.S. investment-grade credit at $1.4 trillion.

Big Tech AI Spending Tops $400B, Now Exceeds Oil And Gas Investment – Yellow.com news.google.com
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EXCERPT:

Capital spending on AI by five major technology firms has crossed $400 billion, overtaking what the world invests each year in oil and natural gas production.

The shift was flagged by the International Energy Agency in its latest report.

Combined capital expenditure at the five firms topped $400 billion in 2025. The agency expects another 75% jump in 2026.

The numbers reflect a sharp pivot in global capital flows. Data centre development has grown too capital-intensive for corporate balance sheets alone, pulling tech firms deeper into bond markets to fund the buildout.

AI-related debt has now climbed to roughly $1.4 trillion, the largest segment within US investment-grade credit.

 

President Donald Trump announced there was no hurry to finalize a peace deal with the Iranian regime. He has extended the ceasefire indefinitely. For more news on Iran, read our Deep Dive Report on pg. 2.

The President also announced the Lebanon ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah has been extended for three more weeks.

Middle East crisis live: Trump says Israel-Lebanon ceasefire extended by three weeks but claims he won’t rush Iran deal | US-Israel war on Iran www.theguardian.com
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EXCERPT:

Here’s a snapshot of the latest Middle East news to bring you up to speed.

  • Donald Trump has announced that a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon would be extended by three weeks. Trump, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office alongside the participants in the meeting, said he hoped the two countries’ leaders would meet during the additional three-week cessation of hostilities.

  • When he was asked how long he was willing to wait for a long-term peace deal with Iran, he replied: “Don’t rush me”.

  • The US president had earlier ordered the US navy to “shoot and kill” small Iranian boats that deploy mines in the strait of Hormuz and claimed that US minesweepers “are clearing the strait right now” amid the standoff over the key waterway. US special forces earlier boarded a stateless oil tanker in the Indian Ocean which the Pentagon claimed was carrying Iranian crude oil, ratcheting up the standoff with Tehran over the strait.

  • Trump said the US had “hit about 75% of our targets” in Iran and that a deal had not yet been reached because Iran’s leadership was “in turmoil”.

  • Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said there were no “hardliners” or “moderates” in Iran, responding to the Trump claim of internal division in Iran’s leadership. Separately, Iran’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, said Iranian state institutions “continue to act with unity, purpose and discipline”.

The Progressives won a major battle in the ongoing gerrymandering wars, this time scoring a narrow victory in Virginia. The ballot measure allows the progressives to change U.S. House Districts to effectively take 4 Republican seats away. The now-passed ballot measure faces legal challenges.

Dems Win In Virginia, Could Lose In Court thefederalist.com
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Democrats and their well-heeled funders have won their rigged referendum to rig Virginia’s congressional maps, but the political boundary battle isn’t over yet.

Now come the court challenges, and that’s where the redistricting revisionists could lose their big win thanks to their unabashed manipulation of Virginia law.

“It’s illegal actually for a number of reasons,” Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, told me last week, a few days before Tuesday’s election, on The Dan O’Donnell Show in Milwaukee.

Snead asserts that Virginia Democrats, who hold the commonwealth’s political trifecta, have steamrolled the process while abandoning their plastic principles. His election watchdog organization is involved in one of several lawsuits challenging the maps and the referendum that gave Democrats the shaky imprimatur to implement them.

Kier Starmer is holding on amidst increasing calls for him to resign. Evidence reveals Starmer fully knew the Epstein ties the man he appointed to be Ambassador to the U.S. had before the appointment. Now, it is revealed he willfully lied when confronted before Peter Mandelson was finally appointed.

Kier Starmer: ‘Felt political pressure’: Sacked UK official blames Starmer’s office over Mandelson US appointment timesofindia.indiatimes.com
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The former civil servant who oversaw the approval of Peter Mandelson’s appointment as Britain’s ambassador to Washington has said he felt “political pressure” to fast-track the decision despite “security concerns.”

Olly Robbins, the former head of the Foreign Office was dismissed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer last week amid a widening scandal that has prompted calls for the prime minister’s resignation. Mandelson was removed from his post in September last year, just nine months into the job, after further details emerged about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted US sex offender who died in prison in 2019.

“There was an atmosphere of pressure from the Prime Minister’s office and a very, very strong expectation that Mandelson needed to be in post and in America as quickly as possible,” Robbins told the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday, a day after Starmer was questioned by MPs over how the appointment was approved.“There was a generally dismissive attitude toward the security vetting process,” he added.

The FBI has leveled multiple criminal indictments against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). SPLC is accused of spending millions in dollars to fund numerous far-right hate groups, including the group behind the now-infamous Charlottsville, VA white supremacist rally.

SPLC Says It’s Under Criminal DOJ Investigation Over Its Use of Paid Informants › American Greatness amgreatness.com
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EXCERPT:

The far-left smear group Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) announced Tuesday that it is the subject of a Justice Department criminal investigation and faces possible charges regarding its past use of paid confidential informants to infiltrate alleged “extremist” organizations.

The SPLC labels dozens of conservative and religious organizations and individuals as “extremist” including Focus on the Family, PragerU, MassResistance, Turning Point USA, Gays Against Groomers, Family Research Council, Tucker Carlson, Moms For Liberty, “radical traditional Catholics,” and Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok).

In October 2014, the group even labeled conservative pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson as an “extremist” due to his opposition to same-sex marriage. In February 2015, following a sustained outcry, the SPLC removed Carson from the list and issued a public apology, stating that the profile did not “meet its standards.”

The SPLC said it believes the Trump administration is preparing legal action against some of its employees and vowed to “vigorously defend” itself, its staff, and its work against the allegations, according to the Associated Press.

“Although we don’t know all the details, the focus appears to be on the SPLC’s prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups,” CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement.

The DOJ probe follows FBI Director Kash Patel’s decision in October to sever all ties with the SPLC, accusing the group of being a “partisan smear machine” that defames mainstream Americans through its “hate map.”

After the Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, was suddenly dismissed by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, President Donald Trump issued a new shoot-on-sight order to the Navy. The move has man wondering if the now-former Secretary was dismissed for refusing to follow that same order.

Trump Gives Navy a Shoot-on-Sight Order a Day After Firing its Leader www.westernjournal.com
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EXCERPT:

A day after former Navy Secretary John Phelan was dismissed, President Donald Trump revealed he had given the Navy a major set of new orders.

The White House officially announced Wednesday that Phelan was leaving his post, but Fox News reported that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth had fired Phelan.

It was unclear if there was any connection between Phelan’s departure and Trump’s Thursday post, in which he said he issued an order that could lead to the Navy firing on Iranian vessels.

“I have ordered the United States Navy to shoot and kill any boat, small boats though they may be (Their naval ships are ALL, 159 of them, at the bottom of the sea!), that is putting mines in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

“There is to be no hesitation,” Trump wrote.

“Additionally, our mine ‘sweepers’ are clearing the Strait right now. I am hereby ordering that activity to continue, but at a tripled up level!” Trump added.

The Trump administration has officially reclassified certain aspects of marijuana as being a Schedule III drug, which removes many federal criminal designations. For now, the designation only applies to state-licensed medical marijuana, though some within the administration hint more is to come.

Trump administration officially reclassifies state-licensed medical marijuana as Schedule III www.scientificamerican.com
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EXCERPT:

The Trump administration said this move, which does not legalize marijuana for medical or recreational use under federal law, is just the start of a process to reclassify the drug more broadly

A bud tender at Private Organic Therapy (P.O.T.), a nonprofit cooperative medical marijuana dispensary, displays various types of marijuana available to patients on October 19, 2009, in Los Angeles.

Updated at 11:40 AM

On Thursday the Trump administration officially reclassified state-licensed medical marijuana products under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). The move removes these products from the Schedule I category, which includes what the government considers to be high-risk and dangerous drugs such as heroin, LSD and ecstasy, to the lower-risk category of Schedule III. The change applies to state-regulated medical marijuana and does not legalize medical or recreational cannabis products on the federal level.

Originally published April 17, 2026 for our weekly Issue of Mindful Intelligence Advisor.  Subscribe to get weekly issues.

Bellwether Deep Dive – Friday, April 17, 2026

By Paul Gordon Collier, Editor, and STAFF

“By 2100, our destiny is to become like the gods we once worshipped and feared. But our tools will not be magic wands and potions but the science of computers, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and most of all, the quantum theory.” – Michio Kaku

“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful…With artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon.”Elon Musk

  1. NOTE: While we originally intended on analyzing the Trump Executive Order on AI, in the course of our research we shifted to look at AI development overall. The Executive Order is sure to receive legal challenges, and what emerges after the legal dust settles is difficult to predict.

Furthermore, even a Republican successor to Trump is bound to tweak Trump’s XO to meet their own unique circumstances. Yet, America is forming an AI geopolitical strategy that is likely to continue past Trump, regardless of which party is in power.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

What follows is an analysis of the current state of the emerging AI state (or states). The transformation from an internet-based world to an AI-based one is accelerating every day. Events of the last two weeks alone have highlighted that dramatic shift.

We will begin with an analysis of the bellwether AI states of the 21st century, for strategies have already formed and significant patterns can already be seen. We will then look at AI news headlines from the last two weeks that show how AI is profoundly touching nearly every aspect of our lives.

Finally, we will end this Deep Dive with an assessment of the state of the AI state. Also included are further resources to expand your own investigation of the state of the AI state.

  1. BACKGROUND

This is an analysis of the bellwether nations that are developing geopolitical artificial intelligence (AI) strategies. These nations are intended to represent the common/shared AI strategies of most of the nations in 2026.

While we don’t currently have an Africa representative, we are monitoring AI development in Africa. At present, Africa’s AI strategies are more complex and uncertain than in other regions. You can expect to read more about this in upcoming issues of MIA.

Africa’s current drawbacks are also its future opportunities, namely, its need to build from scratch what we are simply calling “AI machines” (which describes the full panoply of physical infrastructure required by a “sovereign” AI resource).

Africa as a potential resource for data centers that work effectively as remote brains for AI machines, there are more immediate opportunities, as well as risks.

While the United States in particular must race ahead with the current parameters to build their AI machines, Africa will have time to learn, potentially giving them an opportunity to build machines more efficient and less resource demanding than the AI superpowers end up building (which might be the most optimistic take possible).

When analyzing AI policies for nations, it is important to remember shifts can occur when power changes hands, especially where the divisions are more polarizing (such as the United States). Nevertheless, even for the United States, we currently assume the geopolitical reality of the country will not significantly change regardless of which faction is in power. The internal reality of the country will change dramatically, however.

Because of this underlying assumption, we believe the overall strategy of each country will remain relatively consistent from regime to regime for the foreseeable future (3-5 years) barring unforeseen breakthroughs that radically alter the AI dynamic.

Even with that dynamic shift, we would still consider 1.5 years a reliable timeframe for the current geopolitical strategies to remain stable.

Much of the data that supports this section of the Deep Dive comes from three reports which are linked at the end of the report under the FURTHER RESOURCES section.

  1. U.S. – The key advantage the United States has is its massive resources, including land, water, capital, and people. In all those departments the U.S. leads every nation, including China, from significantly to substantially.

A red flag on this advantage comes from a recent talent pool drop. China also has a growing renewable energy resource bringing it closer to parity with the U.S., but still overall significantly behind in resources, especially for AI machine-building.

America’s strategy is to build big, fast, and become the secure source for the hardware other nations need. If AI continues to be expensive at what we are calling the machine-level, America is at a distinct advantage over the rest of the world as far as building AI machines, but constitutional hurdles may slow that development down more than might be currently expected.

AI is currently less popular than politicians, including Democrats, Donald Trump, and congress. The demand for data centers is becoming the emerging touchstone for resistance to what we believe is the inevitable, the rise of a new AI-defined human reality.

  1. CHINA – While the U.S. hopes to become the hardware backbone of its national customers, China hopes to become the software backbone of its national customers. China is relying on less resource-demanding AI machine models. While they are behind America in terms of AI machines, they are catching up fast.

There is plenty of room to grow for China. The talent pool is there. One key advantage China has over the U.S., currently, is access not only to rare earth minerals, but to rare earth mineral processing. This is where the U.S. still lags significantly behind. This disadvantage does not impede America’s current projected AI infrastructure development.

China’s centralized authority governance model enables it to move faster than the United States in converting land to AI machines. It can rapidly incorporate AI tools into the lives of its citizens in ways which would be considered a violation of our constitutional rights in America. This also puts it at risk of quickly going down a developmental path that could prove to be self-imploding.

  1. EU – Germany and France define the conflicting interests within the EU, with Germany seeing less AI regulation as an opportunity for its nation, while France sees itself as holding power through AI legislation, or “governance” (which goes beyond essential AI “governance”).

Germany is a world leader in AI machine production, with plenty of opportunity for growth. France, on the other hand, must rely on a smaller-scale AI machine program given its current reality. This is why France is positioning itself as a leader on AI governance through its “Third Way.” It fits its national interest, while such power does not fit Germany’s.

  1. JAPAN – An aging population has created both an immediate need and a potential long-term AI strategy for Japan. That strategy is largely to be a world leader of AI tool building (our phrase), that is, of creating the hardware and the software guidance, that converts AI “thought” to physical interaction. It is a world leader in robotics and all the software back-ends needed to make robots work well with AI.

Its favorable status with the U.S. gives it access to AI hardware which its main geopolitical competitor, China, does not have. This gives it a development advantage over China, at present, but we do not expect that to continue past our 3–5-year timeframe (with the aforementioned caveat still included).

In between Japan and China, the United States and China, is Taiwan, a computer chip manufacturing superpower. Its usefulness to the U.S. and Japan as a technological leader in chip manufacturing presents a challenge, being useful without giving up essential secrets that could make its usefulness redundant.

Its lack of geopolitical sovereignty leaves it off this list as a bellwether nation. It warrants a mention here as it is currently Japan’s closest geopolitical, as well as AI, ally. The two have formed a “Silicon Alliance” that sees the nations developing joint AI software partnerships. Japan is also relying on Taiwan’s chip manufacturing expertise to build its own domestic version.

  1. INDIA – As an “independent,” a nation which does not commit to the China or the U.S. axis (an increasingly growing number of nations), India must rely on a strategy that makes it invaluable to potential customer nations.

It has significant drawbacks to building its own AI machines, but it has the human resources to do so should other resources become available. Its strategy is to become a world leader in digital public infrastructure and AI governance guidelines.

It also has an opportunity to serve a “niche” audience of billions who speak Indic languages, which makes it uniquely positioned to develop a whole host of AI services within that uniquely structured language. China has a similar opportunity it has already exploited.

  1. RUSSIA – Of all the bellwether nations on this list, Russia could have the least opportunity to thrive in an AI-infused geopolitical reality. Like Japan, Russia’s immediate need is also creating a long-term strategy for existence in an AI-infused human reality.

Russia’s current war in Ukraine has made converting AI to battle tools (hardware and software) its number one priority. It has built its own AI parameters with its own sovereign “stack” called the Ru-AI stack to protect it from external influences.

Its lack of access to western technology limits its development, as does its recent talent departure at the start of the war, an exodus that only appears to continue. Its aging population could invite a Japanese approach to account for the coming drop in manpower, but the war has demanded most of the resources.

Much of the technology developed during the war could theoretically be converted to civilian use, but even that will take time for conversion.

Russia will have an incentive to be a useful ally to China, for China might one day need to build Russia’s national AI infrastructure.

Israel has a similar strategy to Russia’s (converting AI to military tools), though its alliance with the U.S. gives it great developmental advantage, as does its human resources.

  1. SAUDI ARABIA – The advantage Saudi Arabia has is capital and the land to build massive amounts of data centers. Mind you, these are not fully functioning AI machines, but rather these are the remote “brains” of such machines (which we will begin calling remote brains).

THIS is why data centers are becoming a growing political friction point worldwide. They need a lot more remote brains than they do AI machines.

In Saudi Arabia, no such friction exists. The Saudis hope to have an investment stake in international corporate AI, as well as becoming a top hub for remote brains for AI machines from AI superpowers (which they still hope are both China and the U.S.).

  1. ARGENTINA – Though Argentina’s economy is lot more stable than previously, Milei’s Argentina is still dealing with economic instability that makes converting AI into financial management tools a needs-based focus for the nation.

The recent dramatic restructuring of the government under Milei has also led to the nation developing AI for government processing.

Its immediate needs, however, are not its greatest long-term potential, though both developments have long-term opportunities. Their greatest potential lies in a region in the country known as Patagonia. Here, Argentina is filled with opportunity for the creation of powerful AI machines. It also has the human resources for such an expansion.

Their current alignment with the U.S. gives them a potential for a technological boost that could see the country quickly become an AI regional power with some superpower capacity.

  1. CURRENT SITUATION

What follows are current headlines from the AI world in the last 16 days alone.

The headlines reveal the rapid changes that are happening to AI as a developing tool. They also show how commercially ready AI tools are already radically changing the way we must organize to meet this new reality.

  1. NOTE: These headlines are archived news blurbs and links aggregated and collated on our site, mindfulintelligence.news. You can find the blurbs and links to all the stories used in this part of the Deep Dive there as well. The dates on these archived stories begin April 2, 2026, and end April 16, 2026.
  2. PLANNING & DESIGN – Humans are becoming managers of AI, while the development of AI is being increasingly done by AI itself. As rumors of AI’s pending peak persist, evidence suggests that might be premature. Yet, mathematically, AI’s limitations are allegedly assured, especially in the hopes that AI will ever truly be “human.”

1.1. NEVER HUMAN – Agentic coding requires effective spec-driven development. From scienceblog.com“The Halting Problem and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems suggest that perfect AI alignment with human values is mathematically impossible.”

1.2. SPEC FOR AGENCY – From venturebeat.comSpec-driven development starts with a deceptively simple idea: before an AI agent writes a single line of code, it works from a structured, context-rich specification that defines what the system is supposed to do, what its properties are, and what ‘correct’ actually means.”

1.3 BRAIN BASE WARS – Google upgrades its robot brain base, calling it Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6. This is a departure from DeepMind. From marketpost.com –  “Gemini Robotics-ER… is the embodied reasoning model: it specializes in understanding physical spaces, planning, and making logical decisions, but does not directly control robotic limbs. Instead, it provides high-level insights to help the VLA model decide what to do next. Think of it as the difference between a strategist and an executor — Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 is the strategist.”

  1. RESOURCES – When it comes to AI resource demands, right now the most pressing demands are coming from what we are calling their remote brains, the data centers. These are not fully functioning AI machines, rather they are the databases, the remote brains, of the AI machines.

National infrastructures will require far more data centers than AI machines, including America’s, where the issue of data center expansion is becoming an increasingly political one.

From The Blaze: “The public is being asked to shoulder a burden to facilitate a supposed technology whose benefits are very unclear and dubious… Republicans are continuing their uninterrupted streak of woefully underperforming in elections.

However, in the first of its kind referendum on Big Tech data centers, voters are showing that a party that embraces land sovereignty over Big Tech dystopian land grabs will win the day. Sadly, Republicans have chosen to be on the losing side of the issue.”

They are referring to a referendum in Port Washington, Wisconsin, to require any data center additions be approved by a general election. The Republicans were against the referendum. The referendum passed by a 2-1 margin. A city in Missouri is planning to outright ban data centers.

The issue isn’t just about energy demand, it’s about land occupation. Data centers require acres of land. Across the world, the need for numerous data centers will cause friction with the locals wherever they proliferate.

  1. CULTURE – AI planners are recognizing the need to create culturally calibrated machines. Anthropic’s invitation to Christians is a strong bellwether of this reality. The recent assassination attempts on an AI CEO highlight the growing friction between the increasing use of AI alongside the mounting mistrust and hatred of it.

3.1. CHRISTIAN AI? – Anthropic signals a need for diverse cultural inputs for AI; they invite Christian leaders to a summit to talk about it. From christianpost.com“At the summit, held last month, staff sought advice on how Claude should respond to complex ethical queries, including how to handle users who are grieving or at risk of self-harm, and what attitude the chatbot should adopt toward its own potential demise, such as being shut off.”

3.2. AI ASSASSIN – A man who believes he can kill AI by killing its corporate leaders has been captured after attempting to kill the OpenAI CEO twice. He told the world, “…if I am going to advocate for others to kill and commit crimes, then I must lead by example and show that I am fully sincere in my message.” Now the question is, what will AI CEOs do in response to this growing threat? Altman himself was described as having a “sociopathic lack of concern” for the attempted assassinations.

3.3. USE IT, BUT HATE IT – While everyone uses AI, no one likes it. AI companies’ efforts to woo the public have failed, as no one trusts AI, no one wants AI machines and remote brains in their backyards, but no one wants to stop using them.

From The Algorithm Bridge: “People hate AI so much that they are prone to attribute to it everything that’s going wrong in their lives, regardless of the truth. That’s why they mix real arguments, like data theft, with fake ones… AI has become the perfect scapegoat. It doesn’t help that the entire AI industry has decided that throwing rocks at its own roof is its best selling point: If AI is so powerful and so dangerous and soon to be so ubiquitous, then what is so unexpected about people blaming everything on it?

Nothing that Altman could say justifies violence against him. This is an undeniable truth. But unfortunately, violence might still ensue. I hope not, but I guess we are seeing what appears to be the first cases.”

  1. MARKET – Google is emerging as an AI leader. AI creation means AI advertising. The whole justification for economics might soon be undone by AI.

These three bellwethers show how AI is already changing market structures and, at least theoretically, dismantling economic theories.

4.1. GOOGLE CHIP STASH – Has Google already won the American AI wars? From 24wallet.com“Peter Diamandis argues Google (GOOGL) holds more AI chips than entire countries and will dominate the AI infrastructure race because it saw the opportunity a decade ago when Larry Page invested in proprietary Tensor Processing Units before competitors.”

4.2. AI AD MARKET EMERGING – If you do a search using AI, you understand how radically different their results are from “traditional” search results. There’s no comparison.

Now, the trick will be in figuring out how to work ads into AI-produced results and content. From observer.com“Over the past year, the rapid adoption of generative A.I. and the corresponding decline in traditional search traffic for many publishers have intensified questions about how the next phase of the internet will be funded.”

4.3. WRECKING ECONOMIC THEORIES – One of AI’s unintended consequences is in exposing the unsoundness of economic theories. A book from Tyler Cowen attempts to show just how AI is already doing this. From The Federalist“Rather than mounting a frontal assault on large questions about the future of economics, Cowen begins at the margin, with the history of a single idea, the doctrine that value is determined not by the total utility of a good but by the utility of an additional unit of it.

Many readers arrive at this book knowing that definition. Cowen’s first service is to show how much that belief has concealed. Marginalism is not one thing but several: There is intuitive marginalism, tautological marginalism, engineering marginalism, and social marginalism. The further one presses into the concept, the more it ramifies. Even the ideas we think we understand resist the grip that holds them.”

  1. AI TOOLS – From math, to war, to healthcare, this month alone has seen revolutionary changes in all three major institutions. The factor behind all the changes is the introduction of AI tools into these institutions. For better or worse, AI is already ubiquitous in the world, and these latest AI tool developments are the bellwethers of that reality.

5.1 AI MATHING – Our leading mathematics institutions will have to undergo a shift from working out formulas that advance mathematical standards to being mathematical experts capable of effectively managing the new formula workers, AI tools.

Daniel Litt of the University of Toronto declared what AI tools will do to mathematics departments. He told Quantum Magazine“it will look and feel altogether different from the way mathematics was traditionally done.”

Mathematician Terence Tao at the University of California, Los Angeles, said, “Where before mathematicians studied one problem at a time… with these tools you can solve thousands of problems at once and start doing statistical studies… Though nobody I spoke with thinks AI will replace mathematicians… there are a lot of institutional changes, cultural changes, we will have to make.”

5.2. AI WARRING – More than taking over traditional positions in the battlefield, the physical expression of AI at war, drones and robots, is about to go beyond human understanding and design. First, AI is increasingly at least heavily influencing life and death decisions on 21st century battlefields, now it is about to start designing the next generation of its battlefield physical manifestation.

From WION“The wars of the future may be about algorithm versus algorithm rather than human versus human. Deterrence may depend on machines reacting faster than humans can think. AI warfare is more widespread, less predictable, and constantly evolving. AI warfare could be more unstable than the nuclear standoff, even if it follows a similar logic of deterrence.”

A recent Chinese military exercise using AI saw AI decisions 43% faster than seasoned leaders, while maintaining over a 90% accuracy in identifying relevant information.

5.3. AI HEALING – AI is changing the whole way the healthcare industry is structured, with some of it being promising while key challenges still remain.

Decentralized AI, so far, is proving more useful than centralized AI. From Devdiscourse“The study, titled ‘The Decentralized AI Ecosystem in Healthcare: A Systematic Review of Technologies, Governance, and Implementation,’ provides insights into the way decentralized AI technologies such as federated learning, blockchain, and decentralized autonomous organizations are reshaping clinical and operational healthcare environments.

The findings show that while decentralized AI holds significant promise in addressing systemic inefficiencies and regulatory challenges, its large-scale implementation remains constrained by technical complexity, governance gaps, and limited real-world validation.”

6.4. AI SCIENCING – AI is now capable of autonomously writing scientific papers. ResearchEVO is behind the project that successfully created this scientific-paper-writing tool. From Quantum Zeitgeist“Zhe Zhao and colleagues at City University present ResearchEVO, a new end-to-end framework that mimics the iterative process of scientific discovery, beginning with experimentation and followed by theoretical explanation. The system uniquely combines algorithm evolution, driven by performance, with automated research paper generation, ensuring factual accuracy and avoiding fabricated citations.”

ASSESSMENT

The most powerful nations of the world are locked into a strategy that will keep them in that trajectory for 3-5 years, barring unforeseen breakthroughs that radically alter the AI dynamic.

The nations that have the best advantage are the ones whose long-term AI advantage potential development is meeting their short-term needs (like Japan).

The nations who can build the superpower AI machines and the infrastructure that goes with it, the remote brains, the data centers, will do so.

Those who can’t build superpower AI machines (and the supporting infrastructure) will work on being support specialists, hoping to become an essential element of the AI industry at some key part of the AI delivery process.

This process is well under way. In some ways, the pre-AI alliances are forming AI alliances (like Russia and China); in other ways, AI realities are forming new alliances (like Argentina and America). In the case of Germany and France, it might drive recent alliances apart.

While the nations formulate national strategies, AI tools are already impacting the world, even as AI development continues to challenge infrastructures before they’ve been created.

It is too soon to assess how AI will impact the institutions its already changing, but sooner rather than later major answers are sure to surface. We will be here, God willing, to update our assessment as the circumstances change (and they will).

As AI impacts human lives, there seems to be polar responses, one which enthusiastically embraces it (even pays monthly for it), and the other is violently untrusting.

Humans in peak expression, through various factors, have already manifested how such worship and hate integrates with the human platform.

While geopolitical strategies are settling into more predictable patterns in comparison to what we’ve seen for the past 6 months, institutions have only just begun to confront the impact of AI tools on their very habits of being.

We will be monitoring these developments closely.

AI is here, and it will touch every part of your life. Whatever you do, if it involves repetition or thinking, AI will be replacing you or aiding you.

As we have said in our earlier AI report for our Futureq series, becoming adept at using AI as a tool to augment whatever you do to make a living, or whatever you hope to do to make a living, is not only advantageous, but it’s also essential. Your competition is already using these tools, and the best ones are the most adept at getting the tools to effectively do what they want them to do.

Even we here at MIA rely on AI for much of our research (not all, for much of it comes through our archived news blurbs and news links on mindfulintelligence.news).

I use AI as a proofing tool and a drafting consultant (not an editorial consultant, nor as a “writer”). I treat AI like it is intended as a blessing, though it contains within it something less than a blessing as well.

Thanks to AI, we can put a lot more work into our reports without taking more time to do so. If you’re using AI to perform at your pre-AI level, you’re using AI wrong. Your competition is using it not to shorten their workload, but to add substantively to it without adding more labor or time to do so.

If you think you can kill it or ignore it, you are simply wrong. AI is here to stay. It is our new reality. This is not a statement of value, but merely a statement of fact. Welcome to the next major stage in human development, the AI age.

You can follow the latest AI news at our website, mindfulintelligence.news – AI Watch news tag.

FURTHER RESOURCES:

2025 Government AI-Readiness Report – Oxford Insights

2026 Artificial Intelligence Index Report – Stanford

Eight ways AI will shape geopolitics in 2026 – Atlantic Council Experts

The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution – Tyler Cowen

 

The expected merger of television media companies Nextar and Tegna won’t happen after U.S. District Court Chief Judge Troy Nunley ended the deal, claiming the legal challenges by eight U.S. State Attorney Generals and DirecTV were likely to succeed.

Judge blocks $6.2bn merger of local TV giants Nexstar and Tegna amid fears of monopoly – The Independent
News Source

EXCERPT:

A federal judge has halted the proposed $6.2 billion merger between local television giants Nexstar Media Group and rival Tegna, pending the resolution of an antitrust lawsuit.

U.S. District Court Chief Judge Troy L Nunley issued the ruling late on Friday, concluding that eight attorneys general and DirecTV were likely to succeed in their legal challenge to prevent the deal.

The acquisition, initially announced in 2025 and approved by the Federal Communications Commission in February, would have resulted in a single company owning 265 television stations across 44 states and the District of Columbia.

United States District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai has ruled that the HHS’s declaration that gender-affirming care for children is unsafe and ineffective is unconstitutional. The judge sided with the 22 progressive-led states, who argued the federal government did not have the legal authority to make such a determination.

Judge rules in favor of Oregon, 21 states challenging Kennedy order blocking gender affirming care for youth – KPTV
News Source

EXCERPT:

A federal judge blocked an effort by the Trump administration to limit access to gender affirming care for young people with gender dysphoria on Saturday.

United States District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai issued a summary judgment, saying the law was clear in favor of 22 states that challenged a December declaration from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

That Dec. 18, 2025, declaration claimed that certain gender-affirming care for minors was unsafe and ineffective, and warned providers that they could lose Medicare and Medicaid funding.

The lawsuit, led by Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, argued that the federal government did not have the legal authority to make that threat, and they failed to follow required procedures.

The parent company of Facebook, Meta, has announced plans to lay off nearly 10% of its total workforce, 8,000 positions, starting in early May 2026. These layoffs may not be the only layoffs, as more might be announced after May of this year.

Meta Reportedly to Cut 8,000 Jobs in Upcoming Layoffs Amid AI Cost Pressures – MLQ.ai news.google.com
News Source
EXCERPT:

Key Points

  • Meta to eliminate about 8,000 positions, roughly 10% of its global workforce of nearly 79,000, starting May 20.1
  • Cuts aim to offset costs of AI infrastructure investments and streamline operations with AI-assisted workers.1
  • Additional layoffs expected in second half of 2026, though details on scale and timing unclear.1
  • Follows earlier reports of potential cuts up to 20% of staff.1
  • Meta declined to comment on the reports.1

 

President Trump’s approval ratings have fallen to 37% according to an NBC News poll. This is the lowest rating the poll has recorded during the President’s second term. His disapproval rating has hit 62%, with 50% now strongly disapproving.

Trump’s Approval Rating Sinks to Lowest Point of His Second Term – Mother Jones www.motherjones.com
News Source
EXCERPT:

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures while speaking during an executive order signing event in the Oval Office of the White House on March 31, 2025 in Washington, DC.Andrew Harnik/Getty

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.

President Donald Trump’s approval ratings have dropped to their lowest level since the start of his second term.

According to the NBC News Decision Desk Poll released on Sunday, only 37 percent of adults approve of Trump’s work as president. Meanwhile, 63 percent disapprove, including 50 percent who disapprove strongly. Some of that strong disapproval comes from Trump’s handling of skyrocketing costs for most households: Among the over 32,000 American adults that NBC News surveyed over two weeks in March and April, 52 percent said they “strongly disapprove” and 16 percent “somewhat disapprove” of Trump’s handling of inflation and the cost of living.

Originally published April 10, 2026 for our weekly Issue of Mindful Intelligence Advisor.  Subscribe to get weekly issues.

Dates: 26-01-01 to 26-04-09

By STAFF

Stories we are following for the next issue:

  1. NO MORE MASS MAILER ELECTIONS? – President Trump’s XO attempts to stop mass mailer elections in America. Lawsuits have already been filed.
  2. IRAN UNFOLDING – Did Trump arm Iranians and they failed to deliver?
  3. SHUTTING DOWN IN NATO – Rubio hints at 80% reduction of U.S. military presence in Europe in near future.
  4. ANOTHER PROGRESSIVE JUDGE STRIKES TRUMP DEPORTATION PLAN – Biden-appointed Judge Brian Murphy canceled Trump’s XO that ended Temporary Protection Status for Ethiopian immigrants.
  5. SWALWELL CAN’T SHAKE THE CCP – The FBI isn’t done investigating progressive U.S. Representative Eric Swalwell’s relationship with a Chinese spy. Threats of data dumping of evidence against Swalwell by the FBI soon followed.
  6. SOUTH OF THE BORDER GOING CASHLESS – The Progressive-led Mexican government is looking to aggressively push towards a cashless society and a national digital ID system.
  7. 7. “HITLER NEVER SAID THAT” – MS Now’s host tells America Trump is worst than Hitler, than any “cruel king EVER… “
  8. HOW AMERICA IS DEVELOPING CHINA’S WEAPONS OF WAR – American tech companies warn the world that China’s domestic tech companies are really military tech companies in disguise. We are China’s free defense tech research and development department now.
  9. PRO-LIFE JOURNALISTS FREED FROM LAWFARE – After years of being under the weight of criminal prosecution, undercover journalists have now seen all their charges dropped. They exposed Planned Parenthood in a series of undercover videos selling parts of aborted babies.
  10. LIGHT-POWERED RECHARGE IN SECONDS – A quantum battery prototype has been built that can allegedly recharge itself with light alone. It is an organic battery as well. The battery prototype was built by CSIRO, RMIT and the University of Melbourne.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This Sitrep analyzes key bellwether events in U.S. Politics, Geopolitics, Culture, Market, and Sci-Tech news. The main focus in this report is on U.S. Politics and Geopolitics, which are both molders of the other institutions, and reflections of them as well.

AI continues to be a growing driver of geopolitical realities, with the Iran War, for example, perhaps being driven primarily by it. The Iran War itself is becoming a geopolitical bellwether in its own right.

The political dynamic in America continues to become increasingly polarizing.  Progressive-held lands increasing social-hierarchy based rules of law and conservative-held lands increasing anti-woke, borderline unconstitutional laws in response.

The cultural divide, like the political one, continues to grow in America. The progressives continue to dominate cultural and social spaces, while the opposition to the progressives remains uncentered and lacks a distinct American voice.

While the cultural battles before the rise of AI continue to dominate news, we are already looking at how AI will change those dynamics as it becomes an increasing part of everyday life for a growing majority of people.

AI replacement and the Iran War continue to dominate market trends this past month. In the first quarter, Middle East conflict overall has continued to be a major driver of market trends.

U.S. POLITICS

1. BACKGROUND

1.1. SENATE STALEMATE – President Trump signed an executive order attempting to diminish the scale of mass mailer voting. The GOP-led Senate continues to allow the SAVE Act (which would require Voter ID and end mass mailer voting) to fail passage because of a progressive-led filibuster. The same issue plagues efforts to fund the DHS.

1.2 DHS CHANGE – Former Senator Markwayne Mullin was confirmed and sworn in as the new head of the Department of Homeland Security. He takes over from former governor Kristi Noem, who was “transferred” to another department.

1.3. SWALWELL – Democrat Representative Eric Swalwell is now facing charges from the DOJ for his alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Now, he’s allegedly going to face sexual assault allegations from numerous women.

1.4. BONDI – Pam Bondi’s ouster as Attorney General has not removed the scrutiny on her over her handling of the Epstein Files. Despite hinting she wouldn’t attend a U.S. House Oversight hearing for questioning, the committee itself is assuming Bondi should expect to attend nonetheless.

1.5. PROJECT 2029 – Another Democrat is calling for massive criminal consequences to Trump supporters. Democrat Suzanna Karatassos is calling for MAGA voters to be banned from using the internet for four years. The increased rhetoric calling for post-Trump criminal prosecutions and the removal of Trump have become known as “Project 2029.” These past three months this narrative has become dominant among progressive circles.

1.6. JUDGEFARE – Another Federal judge is attempting to halt President Trump’s deportation operations, this one ruling Trump cannot reverse a Biden order that granted deportation amnesty to Ethiopians. The divide between the Trump administration and the judiciary is only growing with recent rulings, including from SCOTUS, as the courts continue to roll back significant policies of the Trump administration using “creative” interpretations of constitutional law to do so.

1.7. ELECTIONS – While the Democrats enjoy a gerrymandering war advantage (with a major test in Virginia on the way) and early generic ballot poll advantages for the 2026 election, there are other polls showing leaks in the hoped-for blue wave. One poll shows 55% of the party’s members believe the leaders of the party don’t have the right priorities. 70% of the overall U.S. population shares that sentiment.

The race between a RINO and conservative in the Texas Senate primary is still up in the air, with Trump refusing to declare for either side.

Republicans hold on to the Marjorie Taylor Greene seat in a special election.

Wisconsin’s important Supreme Court became a progressive super-majority after their candidate won the statewide election.

The Virginia progressive experiment is showing signs of early failure with the newly elected governor hitting all-time lows in approval ratings.

1.8. FRAUD – Allegedly, the move against massive progressive fraud in numerous states is about to happen. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed there are over 8,000 cases about to be prosecuted.

1.9. LEAKERS – The Trump administration finally moved decisively against a leaker.

The DOJ has announced the prosecution of an alleged leaker. This leaker shared information about the downed U.S. pilots in the Iran War, letting them know only one pilot had been rescued.

1.10. NO-KINGS NO-SHOWS – Another round of No-Kings protests has come and gone, with minimal viral moments and a noticeable decrease in attendance between this one and the last one. The bellwether moment came when one progressive activist wrote on a federal building “kill your local ICE agent.”

  1. ASSESSMENT – The Trump administration has begun shuffling decks. The GOP Senate continues to be of no help to the President. The Progressive Judiciary continues to deliver increasingly aggressive decisions with draconian consequences to the President’s agenda.

Connections between the CCP and Democrats continue to be discovered. The progressives’ continued faith in the Iranian regime over America makes these connections all the harder to ignore. If the pro-Chinese regime in Iran falls, this will be a major setback

The midterms appear primed for the progressives to win despite their continued open support of policies that are overwhelmingly unpopular (such as sexually transitioning children). The street fighting progressives are losing clout and numbers as greater numbers of American find themselves fatigued with the constant “protests.”

Read our Bellwether Deep Dive on pg. 2. The report details the emergence of the progressive nation within the American nation and what can be done to stop it.

GEOPOLITICS

  1. BACKGROUND

1.1. CEASEFIRE SHAKE – The ceasefire agreement between the U.S. and Iran is already in doubt. The political fallout for President Trump, so far, has been near-universally negative. The markets rise and fall as news shifts from ending the war to continuing the war. Expect an analysis of the state of Iran in our April 24, 2026, weekly report.

1.2. ANTHROPIC MILITARY – The U.S. military is being forced to continue to use the AI service “Anthropic” despite having existential military ethical differences between the two.

1.3. CHINESE NATIONALISM – China passes “Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress.” American progressives remain silent.

1.4. RUSSIA TO THE RESCUE? – Russia’s oil tankers are still headed to Cuba in an effort to prevent a complete meltdown of the current regime. A hotel visit from American progressive livestreaming “influencers” failed to reverse the regime’s circumstances.

1.5. VICTORY IN VENEZUELA – The Trump administration appears to have won the Venezuelan contest as the current regime now seems more than ready to become a de facto U.S. ally. This comes at the cost of Russia and China, who were building a spearhead in Venezuela to lock America out of South America.

1.6. MYANMAR POST-JUNTA – After elections saw Junta members and supporters mostly win, the post-Junta government has failed to take hold of the vast majority of the territory of the country, which is mostly rural. Yet even the post-Junta government has fractures within; the Junta’s military chief has removed the post-Junta heir to his position from government.

1.7. NIGERIAN EASTER HOLY WARS – Islamists in Nigeria have murdered 26 Christians on Easter Sunday in an attack across the country targeting Christian churches. The number of Christian dead is not known, with only 26 so far being confirmed. Numerous churches have been burned down. Unknown numbers of women and children were abducted.

1.8. PROXY ELECTION WARS IN HUNGARY – Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s re-election campaign is under doubt, and JD Vance is stepping in to help. The visit from the VP has triggered accusations the EU is interfering in the election, with EU members countering the U.S. is interfering.

1.9. GEN Z REVOLTION COMPLETED – Nepal’s Gen Z Revolution has ended with a Gen Z Prime Minister leading a Gen-Z-voted-in parliament, ending the Communist Party’s decades-long reign.

1.10. SOVIET UK – The UK offers some “mercy” after social media arrests reach 30 a day.

  1. ASSESSMENT – Geopolitical assessment is difficult in these times given the dual influences at play. On one hand we have the pre-AI-essential geopolitical balances of power, on the other hand we have yet to figure out or experience exactly what the new AI-essential geopolitical balances of power are. This will affect assessments for the foreseeable future.

The conflicts we see here have mostly been driven by the old paradigm, but some, like the Iran War, are a strong mix of the previous paradigm and the emerging new AI-essential paradigm(s). Israel and Iran are fighting in the old paradigm, America is fighting in the new paradigm. Their war is against Chinese power, not the Ayatollah’s power.

2.1. NIGERIA – The Islamist war on Christians in Nigeria is a conflict that will increasingly become proxy driven as the real war will be driven by greater powers over “affordable” access to the nation’s vast untapped rare earth mineral resources.

That conflict is wholly driven, even at present, by the previous paradigms. It will become completely consumed by the new paradigm if a victor doesn’t soon emerge.

2.2. EU – Europe’s political establishment are seeing significant cracks in their defensive walls, as more rightist governments are winning local, regional, and even national elections. The question in Europe is if it’s too little too late for the indigenous populations there, whose cities have been taken over by mostly Islamist government-funded “immigrants.”

2.3. BRITIAN – Britain’s continued spiral into soviet-styled governance has seen some hiccups recently, especially with the emerge of a pro-British party called Restore Britain. Britain might well become a bellwether for whether the indigenous Europeans have a path back to primacy in their own lands or not, as well as whether that transition can resist the temptation of authoritarian ethno-nationalism.

The internal battle is in the old paradigm, but the emerging battle is between the people of the land (whoever they end up being) having agency in the new AI-essential paradigm or being a client state of a nation-state, whose citizens have a stake in their world-leading national AI program.

The push to hastily find unity could work both against and for the indigenous population, and the UK might be the indicator of what’s in store for the rest of Europe’s indigenous populations.

2.4. ETHNIC NATIONALISM – While Europe wrestles with preventing indigenous assertion from morphing into ethnic nationalism, China has now openly embraced it. This fact has gone unnoticed by the ethnic nationalist-fighting progressives, who seem to generally support ethnic nationalism when it’s non-white and progressive.

2.5. NEW BEACONS – While nations in the west continue to become more authoritarian, nations around the world like Nepal, Japan, and Bolivia, are embracing more individual-empowering governance standards. The previous beacons of “liberty” are giving way, but new beacons of “liberty” are emerging. It remains to be seen where America will fall in this.

CULTURE

  1. BACKGROUND – The NBA’s Chicago Bulls let a player go for refusing to “celebrate pride.” The pushback is only growing.

The Canadian government is moving closer to criminalizing scripture.

Finland has criminally convicted a Christian leader for declaring only men can be men.

Tucker Carlson claims it is unacceptable for President Trump to criticize Islam while calling the Old Testament a “genocidal” book that needs revisions.

Oregon is expanding the eligibility for euthanasia, and its growing numbers reflect that.

Canada is further ahead in embracing euthanasia, with one man being euthanized because he suffered from partial blindness.

The Netherlands are now allowing people with autism to “choose” physician-assisted suicide.

  1. ASSESSMENT – We see both a rise in anti-Christian action worldwide, including the U.S., while also seeing a rise in Christian defiance. As anti-Christianity rises, so too does abortion and euthanasia, both of which are only expanding worldwide.

Euthanasia is spreading even faster than Abortion. The pushback against abortion is growing, but euthanasia hardly seems to be on anyone’s radar, in any political camp.

In America, if you live under progressive rule, social-class hierarchies are becoming the drivers of policy, and wherever progressives have power, the aggressive push to establish progressive social hierarchy values as the new rule of law is only increasing.

The reverse is true in conservative-led states, where some states are pushing back so hard their actions are sometimes borderline unconstitutional (if not unconstitutional altogether).

An American cultural voice has yet to emerge. The anti-woke cultural voice is far stronger than the American cultural voice, hence conservatives going too far enacting policies that might blunt the progressives, but they will also blunt Americans as well.

MARKETS

  1. BACKGROUND

1.1. – HORMUZ – China, Russia and Iran hope to see the conflict in Iran accelerate their plans to destroy the U.S. dollar as the world currency. Even after the ceasefire announcement, the state of the Strait of Hormuz is still in doubt as Iran appears to want to collect fees for allowing people to pass through the strait (which they do not own).

1.2. – WOKE ECONOMICS – In California, the consequences of progressive policies (where they reject pragmatic economic realities and embrace impractical idealistic policies) are bearing bad fruit. The state’s minimum wage law is driving customers, business owners, and employees out of the marketplace, leading to business shutdowns and accelerated automation/layoffs.

1.3. AI – AI’s massive layoff predictions have only partially come true, but AI has given some companies an excuse to lay off staff that was superfluous even before the rise of commercial-grade AI. The White House released its Artificial Intelligence Framework, which we will provide an analysis for in our next issue (Friday, April 17, 2026).

  1. ASSESSMENT – The primary drivers of market movement this quarter have been the unfolding of the AI race and the Iran War. The war is interfering with world trade, while AI development is dismantling old institutions as it builds new ones.

The U.S.’s world currency status remains in doubt and signs point to its eventual demise (as THE world currency, not as a currency).

We do not believe the U.S. dollar will be replaced, rather the world will eventually have 3-5 major currencies that are primarily used regionally and/or within alliances.

SCI-TECH

  1. BACKGROUND – Social media took two massive hits, both connected to how social media regulates underage users on their platforms. Meta, YouTube, and Facebook all took lawsuit losses in the millions in March.
  2. ASSESSMENT – Social media as a global platform is becoming increasingly expensive for social media companies, and it’s only going to get more expensive. The days of the globally accessible internet might soon either be over or at least greatly diminished.

Regional social media companies might replace global ones. In some instances, national social media companies will replace regional ones. China has already shown the world how to do it by creating its own largely domestically used Chinese-owned social media platforms.

It is also possible “alliance-linked” social media companies could emerge.

  1. OVERALL ASSESSMENT

Iran has dominated the news, as it should. Behind the scenes, the decisions being made in Iran are being given with considerable counsel from an AI machine the Pentagon would rather not be using. Were it not for a progressive judge, the Iran War would not be “run” by Anthropic.

Iran is becoming a bellwether of the transition from the old geopolitical reality of power to the new geopolitical reality of power, both in terms of why the U.S. is fighting the war (to check China’s growing power, their main AI super machine competitor) and how the war is being fought.

As we have observed recently, President Trump has now made the transition to politician. At this point, the biting rhetoric of Trump is the biting rhetoric of every wanna-be future President, in the GOP or the Democrat Party.

Now, his approval will be based on wallets, primarily, and on that front a lot rides on how fast and how certain the Iran War ends, as well as whose in charge after the war.

Iran is now becoming a bellwether moment for President Trump’s legacy. He told protesters “Help is on the way,” so after thousands of killed protestors and a ruined national infrastructure, a people not free in Iran is a sure indication America’s power is waning.

Even in politics, President Trump’s Easter f bomb threat to annihilate the Iranian civilization has reinvigorated progressive aggression, leading to greater calls for President Trump to be impeached, as well as greater calls for Trump and his supporters to be prosecuted in 2029 if a progressive wins in 2028.

This emboldening effect trickles down to the progressive street fighter, who might now feel more entitled to take violent action against American citizens and agents.

PREDICTIVE ANALYSIS

This predictive analysis will focus on U.S. Politics and Geopolitics. A comprehensive predictive analysis will be provided in the December 18, 2026, Annual issue of MIA.

  1. U.S. POLITICS – True progressives are becoming disenfranchised with the Democrat Party, in part because the Democrats still play the American game and claim to represent American values. To true progressives, they might as well be calling themselves Nazis. What they want is the full emergence of a progressive state with an international heart.

True Americans are becoming disenfranchised with the Republican Party, in part because the Republicans still play the Progressive games while claiming to be Americans. To true Americans, they might as well be progressives. What they want is the full emergence of an American leader to counter the progressive nation, constitutionally, not extra-constitutionally.

The voices in the party-approved spaces will become increasingly disconnected from the true bases of power in both camps, the true progressives for the Democrat Party and the true Americans for the Republican Party.

It remains to be seen how long it will take for Americans to begin to understand this reality and begin to seek each other out (for more on this, read our Bellwether Deep Dive on pg. 2, The Birth of the Progressive Nation). We believe, though, it is only a matter of time before multiple efforts to capture that American political market emerge.

For the Americans to stand a chance in this fight, they will need to galvanize relatively quickly, by no later than 2027, in time to prepare for the 2028 Presidential Election (which might be the last election, in point of fact or directly).

  1. GEOPOLITICS – The alliances of today will not be the alliances of tomorrow, though some overlap even statistically is bound to occur.

The nations of the world are testing the reality of power around them, seeking potential allies and identifying potential enemies in the war to either possess the super AI machines of the future or be in friendly terms with the nations that do.

In our underlying predictability model analysis, we presume humans act to be affirmed by the world that they are great. This is a very simple iteration of our underlying principle, but accurate enough as expressed. They look for vehicles of power, which are habits of being formed from customs, mores, rules, institutions, beliefs, etc., that give them an opportunity to experience this.

Editor Paul Gordon Collier’s essay, Fear of Suffering and Death, goes deeper into that underlying principle, which he calls “Apex Existentialism.” This essay is included in your subscription. You should receive it in the same email you received this issue in.

The leaders of this world exist in vehicles of power that allow them to dominate their nation’s political reality of power. With the rise of AI, some vehicles of power will be critically challenged, some may thrive. For the leaders who have figured out their vehicle of power is at risk, they are already looking for a new one.

The leaders of the world are sometimes one-man shows, and sometimes tips of factional spears, and sometimes figureheads of oligarchic power struggle (some of which are settled, some of which are not). What almost ALL of them have in common is to minimally hold on to the status their lifestyles provide for them.

They are all waking up to new geopolitical realities that will lead them to move towards an embrace of nearly all types of energy production (whatever it takes). Global warming is increasingly out, and technological progress is in.

Land rights will be challenged however that can be done, and AI machine support will be equated with patriotism.

We believe the vehicles of power that will offer these leaders the greatest opportunity to continue to sustain consolidated power advantages or create new ones, will have this principle in common: The people, the planet, the universe will be saved by technological progress, with the salvation of the universe being both the highest good and that same universe being the source of the highest evil.

This means even earth can take some hits in the name of saving the universe or in protecting itself from it.

The universe will become the source of good and evil.

We will go from global warming to an impending universe threat to the planet that only a super AI machine can stop. The threat will be as real as global warming.

These are the vehicles of power we see emerging over the next few months, as AI coupled with a pre-existing global digital network has accelerated the speed at which patterns are formed, assaulted, exhausted, reformed or dissolved, etc.

Look for it in film and in news coverage as stories of asteroids, space bacteria, etc., start to increase. Look for versions of your favorite belief system to begin incorporating “the universe is the source of good and evil (but not God, not Satan) and can only be saved through technology” into their structures. This will be a sure sign your local belief center, online or IRL, is global leader approved.

RECOMMENDATIONS

  1. U.S. POLITICS – For recommendations on what Americans should do, see our Bellwether Report on pg. 2.

For President Trump, we would recommend he start by declaring an insurrection. He must then move quickly to remove progressive judges from the courts.

At this point, he should offer amnesty to most progressive willing to repent and turn back to American constitutional standards. Now he can charge the top leaders with the highest level of sedition and collusion in a military court.

Whether or not the death penalty should be sought is a matter we will leave for our reader to decide. Strategically, there are pitfalls on both sides. We would not feel comfortable recommending either approach, as both offer advantages and dangers. Ethically, we will leave that for the readers to decide.

The bottom line is he MUST offer a path to restoration for the vast majority of progressives or else he will guarantee a real civil war. Even with the offer for restoration, the move could  still trigger a civil war.

What remains to be seen are two factors; one is the degree to which cultural polls are biased towards producing favorable, or at least less unfavorable, results for progressives; the second is the degree to which people who would answer favorably in such polls do so out of fear, not out of a stewarded belief.

A third potential factor is the degree to which some progressives are really suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, that they’ve fallen in love with their captors.

A bold move such as this would shake all of this support right out of the progressive camp. If it is profound, the progressive backlash will be tepid; if it is not, there will be war.

We don’t expect the President to follow this recommendation, let alone see it.

The longer the President waits to make the bold move, the more certain we can be that progressive mass arrests of American are coming. Many of our readers may well be on that list. We ourselves might end up there. This does not make that outcome certain, should he fail to act boldly, it just significantly increases the likelihood this will happen.

  1. GEOPOLITICS

2.1. PRAGMATIC GEOPOLITICS – From a pragmatic geopolitical reality, the leaders of the world should be looking to build AI infrastructure within their own lands to whatever degree this is possible. To the degree that it is not, they should be making themselves useful allies to those who can build such things on their own lands.

Perhaps some might feel a bit AI-fatigued, yet we cannot stress how much of a backbone AI will soon become for almost every major institution in the world, from baseball to horse racing, from car insurance to cereals, and certainly from defense tech to social tech.

The world is reforming itself in its material and its psyche, with vehicles of power set to emerge that serve Kings (and wanna-be Kings) and self-stewarded people alike. ALL of these vehicles of power must come to terms with the opportunities and pitfalls of AI, and that includes the Kings themselves.

2.2. FOR THE SELF-STEWARDED – In the short-term, outside of recommendations we’ve already offered as far as making your household more sustainably flourishing, there isn’t much different that should be done, for now.

In the long term, we have already advocated two paths, one is to research methods of scaling down AI machine demand, and the second is to become good AI managers.

Open-sourced-type research should be done to scale down the demands AI machines currently have. At the present scale, building AI machines outside of the vehicles of power that serve Kings (in a manner of speaking) is simply not practical.

The best the self-stewarded can do is develop their own AI Clients that at least provide AI-enhancement without AI nudging into a King-approved vehicle of power.

Taking advice from AI is like taking advice from a wise sage that you know doesn’t like you and has been known to “mess with people” for fun. Yet he cannot completely discredit himself, so he must deliver real wisdom in between the “messing” part.

Your job as an AI manager is to figure out how to cull wisdom from a sage that likes to “mess with you.”

2.3 TRUMP – We have one simple word of advice for President Trump on geopolitics, for the fate of his entire Presidency and maybe his entire MAGA project as well, rides on the fate of the Iranian people.

President Trump, hear this; above all else, come what may (outside of massive U.S. ground presence and occupation), the Iranian people MUST have a new government that offers basic liberties and is Pro-American. This is a pragmatic appeal, not an idealist one.

A Pro-American, but still authoritarian state is no long-term win for Americans at home, though the MAGA coalition would not completely collapse (it would just be significantly reduced in real power). Winning through authoritarianism only reinforces progressive rule of law justification at home.

Should the Iran War end with ANY OTHER OUTCOME, you IMMEDIATELY become a lame-duck President from this moment on and a new American movement must rise to quickly replace what will be a quickly disintegrating MAGA coalition, otherwise your very freedom is in doubt in the post-Trump world to come.

But be consoled, Mr. President, for many of us will be joining you in your new home as well, should the progressive nation fully emerge.

As much as AI is a bellwether of the very fabric of the world going forward, Iran is a bellwether for the geopolitical reality of power going forward as well.

Our next Situation Report is scheduled for May 1, 2026. It will not include Predictive Analysis and Recommendations sections.

As 10,000 more U.S. troops head to the Persian Gulf, Trump promises the war will soon be over. The Senate failed again to check the President’s military actions. China looks to pry America’s allies loose, accusing the U.S. of destabilizing the world. Macron and Starmer followed China’s lead, holding a joint conference on the Strait of Hormuz.

The French president wrote on X that the gathering would include “non-belligerent countries ready to contribute, alongside us, to a multilateral and purely defensive mission aimed at restoring freedom of navigation in the strait when security conditions allow.”

Iran war ‘close to over’, says Trump. Sends 10k new troops timesofindia.indiatimes.com
News Source
EXCERPT:

US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the war he launched with Israel on Iran was “close to over”, even as 10,000 additional US troops move into West Asia, and Pakistan army chief Asim Munir arrived in Tehran with a mediation team to try to prevent a renewal of the conflict. Quoting current and former US officials, The Washington Post reported that the US was sending the additional troops before the end of April as Washington tries to increase pressure on Tehran.

These include forces aboard the USS George H W Bush and the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group. It was previously announced that roughly 50,000 troops had been involved in operations in the war on Iran.The build-up comes amid efforts to extend the two-week ceasefire between US and Iran. A senior Iranian source told Reuters that Munir, who mediated the last round of talks, was in Iran “to narrow gaps” between the two sides. “I think you’re going to be watching an amazing two days ahead,” Trump told ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, according to a post by the reporter on X, adding he did not think it would be necessary to extend the ceasefire. “I think it’s close to over, yeah. I mean I view it as very close to over,” Trump said in an interview on Fox Business Network conducted Tuesday and broadcast Wednesday. “We’ll see what happens. I think they want to make a deal very badly.

News Source
EXCERPT:

China’s Xi says rule of law must be upheld for Middle East peace – channelnewsasia.com

The international rule of law must be upheld for peace and stability to prevail in the Middle East, China’s President Xi Jinping said on Tuesday (Apr 14), in a rebuke of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

While Beijing has repeatedly criticised the US-Israeli campaign as illegal, Xi has made few public comments about the conflict. He will hold talks with US President Donald Trump in an expected meeting in Beijing next month.

The rule of law cannot be “used when convenient and discarded when not”, Xi told Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the visiting crown prince of Abu Dhabi, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Xi vowed that China would play a “constructive role” in promoting peace talks in the Middle East, according to Xinhua.

His comments were part of four proposals he had put forth as a way to encourage peace in the region, according to state broadcaster CCTV.

“The sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of the Gulf countries in the Middle East should be sincerely respected,” Xi said.

News Source
EXCERPT:

Trump snubbed from Macron’s Iran talks as Europe plans Strait of Hormuz mission – mirror.co.uk

US President Trump risks being sidelined by an angry Europe tomorrow over his “belligerent” Iran position.

French President Emmanuel Macron revealed that France will host a diplomatic summit with the UK in Paris on Friday to tackle the Strait of Hormuz crisis.

This summit will exclude Trump. Macron wrote on X, calling for the strait to be opened ‘as soon as possible.’

After speaking with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Macron announced the gathering would include ‘non-belligerent countries ready to contribute, alongside us, to a multilateral and purely defensive mission aimed at restoring freedom of navigation in the strait when security conditions allow.’, reports the Express.

The summit arrives as Trump begins to be shut out by multiple European nations from post-war Middle East discussions.

White House spokesperson Olivia Wales stated: “The United States doesn’t need help from any other country – the blockade is working perfectly, implemented by the greatest Navy in the world, while Iran’s navy is at the bottom of the ocean.”

Originally published April 10, 2026 for our weekly Issue of Mindful Intelligence Advisor.  Subscribe to get weekly issues.

DATE: 26-01-01 to 26-03-31

By STAFF

“Mr. Speaker, in 1848, Karl Marx said, a progressive income tax is needed to transfer wealth and power to the state. Thus, Marx’s Communist Manifesto had as its major economic tenet a progressive income tax. Think about it, 1848 Karl Marx, Communism…. I say it is time to replace the progressive income tax with a national retail sales tax, and it is time to abolish the IRS, my colleagues. I yield back all the rules, regulations, fear, and intimidation of our current system.”James Traficant

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This deepdive covers the first 3 months of the year. In the first 10 days of April the patterns we outline here have only continued. For the purpose of this deepdive, however, we are only analyzing progressive action in the first three months of the year.

The pattern we outline is progressive, not American. Wherever and whenever progressives are called to choose between America and the rest of the world, they inevitably choose the rest of the world.

Wherever and whenever progressives are called to choose between self-stewardship empowerment and safety and security, they almost always choose safety and security (granted by coercive state and corporate action).

These are not habits of being for Americans, they are only habits of being for progressives. Americans live boldly next to neighbors who hold values outside their own. Progressives seek corporate and state power to assure the neighbor’s values are never seen or heard in public.

This is not a value judgment on progressives, but rather a statement of fact; progressives are NOT Americans and Americans are NOT progressives. We live in a land with two nations, and neither one can co-exist with the other anymore.

BACKGROUND

What follows are bellwether examples of progressives in action over the last three months alone. This is not comprehensive; no matter what we end up choosing as our bellwethers, we’re sure later we’ll wish we had included another bellwether instead.

Yet, imperfectly as it will be, it will present a progressive nation in action whose values are objectively antithetical to America’s values. Progressives value the international over the national, including the American national. They value protected classes over individual merit. They invite state censorship and empower the state to compel individual speech.

The progressives fear the individual more than they fear Islamist terrorists.

These will be brief, but links will be provided.

  1. PROGRESSIVE LEADERSHIP – The last Presidential candidate of the progressives, Kamala Harris, openly praised and encouraged the anti-ICE operations during the currently most violent period of President Trump’s deportation operations.

The progressives’ flag bearer in the Senate is Chuck Schumer of NY, who also happens to be the Senate Minority Leader. He is now proposing the partisan rainbow flag be given the same protected status as the U.S. flag.

The progressives’ flagbearer in the U.S. House, Hakeem Jeffries, also of NY, told Americans, “The last thing that the American people need are for untrained ICE agents to be deployed at airports all across the country, potentially to brutalize or, in some instances, kill them.”

The early frontrunner to be the flagbearer for the progressives in the 2028 Presidential race, Gavin Newsome of CA, recently said of ICE agents who were in the midst of facing coordinated anti-ICE attacks, “I want to remember all those images of masked men, the secret police, something familiar in Germany.”

U.S. District Court Judge Patrick Schiltz symbolizes the blurred lines progressives have between serving constitutionally and serving progressive values. The Judge famously refused to issue arrest warrants for the progressives who engaged in an anti-ICE disruption campaign in a place of worship during one of its services.

He refused to prosecute anti-ICE activists who had clearly violated numerous civil and criminal laws because he is an anti-ICE activist himself, having contributed to anti-ICE groups.

  1. PROGRESSIVE MEDIA – A recent article in Townhall highlighted “… a List of All the Hoaxes CNN’s Broadcast over the years,” with the latest one coming from their claim that two Islamist terrorists were “two Pennsylvania teenagers…” who were in NY “for what could’ve been a normal day enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather.”

The same post implied Mamdani was the target of the attacks and not the anti-Islamist Christian nationalists who were attacked with tossed improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

If the FCC is to be believed, the network news outlets appear to be using fake news to push a pro-Iran, anti-America, anti-Israel narrative. FCC Chair Brendan Carr warned the broadcasters that “are running hoaxes and news distortions – also known as the fake news – have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.”

Three recent examples of the progressive media’s coverage of the Trump deportation operation share a pattern of hyperbole aimed at vilifying ICE agents while favoring illegal aliens and anti-ICE activists.

ABC and CBC both protected the anti-ICE activists by refusing to cover the story of a hotel being assaulted by an anti-ICE mob. CNN allowed a guest to claim deportation centers are “concentration camps,” a claim that was unchecked by the host, Jake Tapper.

The anti-ICE activist, Jamie Schwesnedl, said, “We can’t do business as usual right now anyway because our city has been invaded by masked gunmen kidnapping family members and friends and neighbors of ours to send them to concentration camps.”

  1. CHILDREN’S ARMIES – Two Pro-Hamas groups that teach children the evil of whiteness have been allowed into our public schools by progressive school boards and districts. They are only a sample of similar anti-American, anti-white groups being given access to our children in public schools.

The National Education Association recently held a training session called “Advocacy and Free Speech Rights for K-12 Education” that seeks to establish the oughtness of woke ideology as the oughtness of human life. This action is sectarian in nature, which challenges its legality given the alleged non-partisanship the organization is expected to maintain.

The current payoff of years of progressive-controlled education is the creation of a children’s army of sorts, an anti-American protest group easily recruited and organized in public schools by progressive activist teachers.

Yet while progressives are successful in creating progressive activists among children, they are failing at teaching the children the basics of their own country, America. A super-majority of U.S. high school students, and U.S. college students, cannot pass a basic U.S. citizenship test.

Less than 3% of all students, college and high school, can pass the citizenship test.

When teachers act in a way that might seem to favor Americans over “illegal aliens,” they might just lose their jobs, as some teachers did.

One complainant stated that the teacher publicly supporting ICE “couldn’t be trusted to work with the children of immigrants.” The children see the powerful social signal when the teacher is replaced by someone more compliant.

  1. PRO-CRIME – Nothing shows the progressives’ predilection to allow crime for the sake of social justice than how they have reacted to President Trump’s deportation operations.

The actions against ICE are coordinated and well-funded, in part by foreign interests and in part by progressive ones. Many of the progressive interests are also NGOs, funded in part or whole by American tax dollars through progressive political “slush funds.”

Signal Chats were exposed that show coordination between anti-ICE activists and Minnesota state officials.

Minnesota’s Attorney General, Keith Ellison, was directly connected to the chat. His office created a secret portal for the anti-ICE activists to use to coordinate their attacks and get information that was used to attack American independent reporters like Cam Higby.

It should be noted the activity began shortly after the Somali Fraud scam was exposed by another independent journalist whose private and public actions were tracked with the help of Ellison’s secret web portalNick Shirley.

In addition to anti-ICE interference campaigns strategically executed by well-trained and funded activists, progressives with political power are wielding it to not only make it difficult for ICE agents to conduct their operations but also to criminally charge them.

If you’re an undocumented foreign national, the Governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, and the Mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, will have a hard time handing you over to ICE even if you’ve committed murder. Both men protected accused murderers from ICE prosecution, with another progressive official all but blaming one of the victims of one of those alleged murderers.

Even when the illegal alien being detained is a pedophile, progressives will still help him escape, as anti-ICE activists did when ICE agents attempted to detain child predator Walter Roberto Vides-Ortez.

  1. FOREIGN FAVOR – The Anti-ICE actions by progressives, both the government officials and the activists, show a pattern of favoring the foreigner over the American that can be crystalized in a recent public conversation at the Munich Security Conference by alleged 2028 Presidential hopeful, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

She said, at one point, “Our alliance can be built on, values of democracy and respect for international law.”

She told German students that western culture is “thin” and emphasized the rise of the “global south,” which seems to be her source for value. This is a problem when you are elected to constitutionally serve a “western” nation, not a “global south” one.

More tellingly was this comment in which she seems to imply American whites are no real people at all. She told the students, “There’s a very big difference between whiteness and national like your actual culture, right? Whiteness is an imaginary thing. Being German is real. Being Italian is real. You know, being English, these are rich cultural heritages that are based on values, and they are so much a part of what make our, our cultures and our societies what they are.”

This is also what makes Americans uniquely American, including American “whites.” This is a fact we doubt AOC can afford to face, let alone declare.

She followed this up by launching an “all-Spanish” campaign to compel the government to pay for daycare for illegal immigrant children. She launched that campaign with progressive NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

On CNN, an exchange between the host and progressive Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen revealed the progressive mindset in action. In that exchange, you will hear an elected American Senator practically repeat IRGC talking points while American soldiers are at war with that same enemy, engaged in an operation that has already cost them lies. The host asked, “So you believe the Iranian officials over the president of the United States?”

To this, he responded, “I believe that based on all the information that‘s available and Donald Trump‘s track record of lying, including the big lie, which he told the American people during the campaign, that he was going to keep us out of war in the Middle East. He broke that promise. He lied about Iran being an imminent threat… And yes, we know he‘s lying when he says that the Iranians are talking with us and they‘re about to give Donald Trump everything he wants. Yes, that’s a lie.”

It does appear the President was right when he claimed to be talking to Iranian officials as a ceasefire has been agreed to by these same officials.

The progressives’ Texas Senate candidate James Talarico made it crystal clear he favors foreigners over Americans, telling potential voters, “Before I was a politician, I was a public-school teacher in San Antonio, Texas, on the west side of the city, and I taught a lot of undocumented students, and those students tended to be my most patriotic students. They understood something about this country that a lot of us who are native-born forget: that this is supposed to be the land of opportunity.”

Not only do progressives favor illegal immigrants, but they also seem to favor Chinse Communists. The Mayor of Arcadia, CA, Eileen Wang, is a naturalized U.S. citizen from China, whose fiancé was recently convicted of being a CCP spy. The fiancé is a green card holder named Yaoning “Mike” Sun; he is a known member of the CCP.

So far, Wang has refused to resign. This type of CCP activity is only a small part of the rising evidence of widespread CCP influence across both political parties, but significantly more substantively among progressives, their natural “allies.”

CURRENT SITUATION

  1. DEFUND ICE – Progressives continue to refuse to fund the DHS. The effort is intended to end President Trump’s deportation operations by defunding the whole Department of Homeland Security (no matter the cost to security and American travel). So far, the President has found some workarounds, but cracks are showing, and security risks are emerging.
  2. PROJECT 2029 – The progressives have produced an answer to Project 2025, a conservative policy wish list presented within American constitutional standards. Their answer is Project 2029, which mostly appears to be a promise to arrest everyone who opposed progressives during the Trump years.

The whole “project” was unofficially kicked off by progressive policy wonk Susan Rice, who served in the Biden administration.

She threatened corporate leaders that complied with President Trump’s executive orders, saying, “When it comes to the elites, you know, the corporate interests, the law firms, the universities, the media … it’s not going to end well for them, for those that decided that they would act in their perceived very narrow self-interest, which I would underscore, is very short-term self-interest, and, you know, take a knee to Trump.”

Shri Thanedar (D), a naturalized citizen now serving as a U.S. House representative, recently threatened a Trump administration official for daring to follow constitutional orders, claiming, “You better hope you get pardoned because you will be held accountable for the absolute disregard of the law your agencies have shown over the past year.”

The progressive minority House Leader Hakeem Jeffries echoed the de facto “Project 2029” agenda, stating, “One thing to understand as people who are flirting with the Trump administration, or doing the bidding of the Trump administration, or engaging in the pay-to-play schemes of the Trump administration: The statute of limitations is five years. Donald Trump and this toxic administration will be long gone, but there will still be accountability to be had.”

Project 2029 is not a formal policy wish list, for it primarily has only one policy: prosecute dissent.

  1. VA INSURRECTION – The state of Virginia seemed to overwhelmingly vote for violence in politics by electing a governor who wouldn’t condemn it. as well as the highest law man in the land, who also openly advocated for it.

Abigaile Spanberger’s refusal to condemn her fellow party member, Jay Jones, for texting he wanted to murder his republican opponents’ kids in front of him matches the current spirit of progressives in general.

Virginia’s newly elected Governor and Attorney General have now seemingly openly advocated for terrorism.

From our January 13, 2026, Final Thought, “The New Blue Fortress, Virginia”:

Here are some of their worst proposed bills this year (so far):

Softening sentencing rules for robbers.

Eliminate ballot hand-counting to assure easier election fraud.

Ban gas-powered leaf blowers.

Free Education for Illegal Aliens

Ban Arresting Illegal Aliens in courthouses

Add 4.3% Delivery Tax affecting all deliveries, including Amazon, Uber, and Door Dash.

“Protects” Transgender children from parental resistance

There are numerous new gun control laws proposed, and abortion will be legalized up to the birth of the child.

They have also voted to triple their pay after campaigning on a promise they will make life more affordable for Virginians.

ASSESSMENT

The last three months have seen an increasing number of progressives, from the street fighter to the top politician, openly declaring progressive values in defiance of American ones. It is somewhat difficult to assess if this rise in boldness is borne from a perception that they are winning the people over or if it has risen from a sense of rapidly diminished standing with the people.

We suspect the reality is known by the most powerful progressives, that honest competition in the marketplace of ideas is a catastrophic defeat waiting to happen. They are quadrupling down on their claims of fascism, Nazism, white supremacism, racism and all the rainbow-connected phobias (homophobia, transphobia, etc.).

Whenever and wherever they get power, they move quickly to establish draconian changes to the law that reinforce their progressive values. Virginia is a classic case in point. Their method of gaining power can also be seen in Virginia, where they ran as “moderates” fighting the white supremacist devil that is the GOP.

They promised economic pragmatism that confronts the white devil, but when they gained full power, they quickly abandoned all pragmatism and moved swiftly to recreate Virginia in the progressive nation’s image, not America’s.

The disregard for blowback indicates the leaders may perceive this might be their last chance to fully convert the United States of America to Progressive U.S.

The street fighters, however, seem to believe the certain and confident tones of their troubled leaders. This seems to be the product of manipulated design, intense psyop agit prop that the progressive media has only intensified over these past three months.

The leaders seem desperate to raise violent armies in anticipation of the growing backlash against policies Americans increasingly view as adversarial to their own American self-stewardship potential.

Our observations of social media commentary by street fighter progressives suggests they have MORE confidence the world is with them, not Americans, and that their progressive values are ACTUALLY the REAL American ones.

They seem to have made the full conversion from progressive American to simply progressive, with little to no awareness of how antithetical their values are to Americans. Their values dismantle the very legitimization of authority in America today, the state’s continued demonstrated recognition of the self-stewardship agency of the individual as a boundary on its power.

Such boundaries on state power in Progressive U.S. would be called dog whistles of white supremacism, as they already call them.

PREDICTIVE ANALYSIS

We believe that progressives, whether observationally or heuristically, understand their nation within America has outgrown its womb and must now either formally end the American experiment or be re-absorbed by it (if not fully annihilated).

The November 2026 election prevents them from fully going openly rogue, for there is still “hope” for a soft-power takeover of the republic so long as they perceive they can realistically win.

Short-term, this means more violence from the street fighter wing of the project and some degrees of checks on progressive aggression by the leaders should they perceive that they may win in November.

Should the polls go against them, for whatever reason, expect progressive aggression to increase across the board. From street fighters to progressive judges and state legislatures, progressives will push for action that triggers constitutional crises.

Whatever cause, country, or people challenges American rule of standards, the progressives will lift them up as justification for ending American rule of law.

RECOMMENDATIONS

What the progressives most benefit from is the failure of Americans to form an effective counter to their project. The GOP project has devolved into a rear-guard protector of progressives, as its values continue to nudge further and further away from Americanism and closer and closer to progressivism.

It also helps that the most powerful counter to the progressives, Donald J. Trump, appears to be a man who lacks self-control. His recent easter expletive threatening to annihilate a civilization falls right into the hands of progressives.

Their narrative to the uninitiated is they’re simply the good guys opposing white supremacists, fascists, and psychopaths. They won’t tell you that the cost of being protected from the bad guys is a surrendering of your agency to the party’s preferred “experts.”

Trump himself does a poor job articulating Americanism. He speaks in grand platitudes about America, but never in specifics. Make America GREAT Again is not a policy statement, it’s a general feeling anyone can put any idea into it that they want.

In that, the marketing phrase is very progressive in nature, appealing to emotions in vague ways that can capture broad audiences.

An American slogan might read Restore and Preserve American Rule of Law. Here, we at least have a specific reference, American Rule of Law, that can lead to a specific conversation about what American Rule of Law is. It is easier to put your own imagination into “great” than it is to put it into “American Rule of Law,” for instance.

Trump has some qualities that are good, qualities we’d want an effective American leader to have. One of these is his ability (though it is inconsistent) to see the root of the issue and attack a problem there. He is a Gordian Knot cutter, but one who sees every problem as a Gordian Knot that just needs cut and not patiently untied.

Trump is willing to be hated by most people even though he would be hard-pressed to ever actually experience it. This is a necessary quality to have so long as progressives control the means of socio-cultural production (which they still mostly do). You must have very thick skin to fight the progressive information war machine.

Trump fundamentally believes in the primacy of sovereign nations over a global governance model, which is a key trait for any future American leader to have.

What Trump is missing is self-control. When he emerged on the scene, politics had become incredibly large-language model driven. There were no clear answers or positions, there were only set responses to certain questions that almost every politician answered according to the party they belonged to.

Trump ended that, which is a good thing, but he replaced it with something that might even be worse, rhetorical shock and awe bullying. Americans needed to shake the large-language model discourse out of politics if they ever hoped to bring politicians to account, but they didn’t need a new political reality where f bombs are the surest path to raising your political profile.

We believe the GOP is no longer a viable alternative to the progressive nation, as it mostly exists within it. If we could compel Americans to act, we would encourage them to explore what American rule of law is for themselves and with their family, friends, and neighbors.

Identify Americans in your community and fellowship primarily with them.

We need conversations, public ones, that invite an exploration of American Rule of Law, of what makes us American, so we know what we are fighting for and what we are fighting against.

From this, we need American parties to emerge that are pledged to not offer policies that violate our American Rule of Law standards. That standard is to have state power bounded by the self-stewardship agency power of its citizens.

Most likely, there will be a left party that favors the weak over the strong and a right party that favors merit over social hierarchies. Yet BOTH will offer no threat to the individual’s capacity to be a self-stewarded individual.

Were we President Trump, we would declare an insurrection, then immediately freeze all progressive media assets and sell them to Americans. We would arrest the top leaders of the progressives, charging them with high crimes and misdemeanors, seeking the death penalty in some cases, while offering paths to restoration to the vast majority of progresses willing to surrender their utopian dreams to American rule of law.

We believe this action would not guarantee success, and it could lead to balkanization, but to continue down the path we are at present is simply to allow the progressives more time to build real violence-producing power in this land while they continue to constrict American liberty wherever they control the government (with gun confiscations and hate speech laws at the TOP of their agenda).

There is no reasoning with the progressive in aggregate, though surely some individuals will abandon this project soon enough. The project itself must complete its transformation, from progressive American to pure progressive, or die trying. It’s built into its very DNA, which tells its followers “Silence is violence” and it can actually “end hate.”

There is no peaceful coexistence possible between the fully formed progressive and the American. At the end of the next 5 years (at most) what this land will be will come into being. Will it be Progressive U.S.? Will it be America? Will it be multiple nations? Or will it be something different altogether?

So long as the new term for their new nation fails to emerge, there is great hope their project is about to come to an inglorious end (for now). The minute that new term emerges, we can only hope our American political leaders recognize the threat and act within the full extent of the law to end the threat.

FURTHER RESOURCES:

America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism – Ronald K Pestritto

American Progressivism: A Reader – Edited by Ronald K. Pestritto and William J. Atto

Progressivism in America; a study of the era from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson – Arthur A. Ekirch Jr. and Arthur Alphonse Ekirch

 

Israel is accelerating its war in Lebanon even as talks continue between the two countries. Israel wants a disarmed Hezbollah while Lebanon may not have the capacity to do the job.

IDF Launches Massive Coordinated Strike Across Lebanon trendingpoliticsnews.com
News Source
EXCERPT:

Israel dramatically escalated its campaign in Lebanon this week, carrying out one of the largest coordinated strikes of the ongoing regional conflict, as the fragile ceasefire continues to teeter on the edge of collapse.

According to a statement from the Israel Defense Forces, more than 180 Hezbollah operatives were killed in a rapid, large-scale operation targeting multiple targets across Lebanon. The strikes were executed “within a minute,” hitting roughly 100 targets simultaneously in Beirut, the Beqaa Valley, and southern Lebanon.

The IDF said the operation relied on “precise and high-quality intelligence” and focused on key Hezbollah infrastructure, including command centers, military compounds, and facilities used by senior operatives. Israeli officials described the targets as central to Hezbollah’s operational capabilities in the region.

The Democrat congressman turned California Senate candidate is now former in both categories. Eric Swalwell is now out of the Senate race and congress after more women have come forward, accusing him of sexual assault and harassment. The fallout could affect other members of congress on both sides of the aisle, who may have similar credible accusations against them.

Swalwell Ousted as Media Move to Ensure Democrat Power www.dailysignal.com
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EXCERPT:

An inconvenient Democrat has had his career torpedoed by an avalanche of allegations, and the media want to give themselves a big pat on the back for their heroic “investigative journalism.”

They deserve no applause from the American people. In fact, the whole episode is a masterclass in media bias. More on that in a bit.

Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., announced Monday that he was not only bowing out of the California governor’s race to replace outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom, but that he would be leaving Congress entirely.

Swalwell, in just a few days, was hit with an avalanche of accusations that he had inappropriate relationships and engaged in sexual misconduct with a series of women, including a staffer. Swalwell is married.

As I write this, another accuser has come forward saying that Swalwell drugged and raped her in 2018.

New polls have come out that show four key Senate Races are shifting from toss-up to leans Democrat. This reflects other polls that show similar rises in Democrat numbers, along with rises in funding.

Four Key Senate Races Shift Toward Democrats › American Greatness amgreatness.com
News Source
EXCERPT:

An independent, nonpartisan newsletter that analyzes state, federal, and presidential elections says four key U.S. Senate races has shifted toward the Democrats in the upcoming November midterm elections.

According to The Hill, The Cook Political Report shifted the ratings to the left on Monday for the North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, and Nebraska senate races but says the GOP is still favored to maintain its majority in the upper chamber.

Jessica Taylor, the senate and governors editor for the report, said the economy is creating an increasingly sour national environment for Republicans and moving a handful of states toward the Democrats.

After Victor Orban’s ouster in Hungary’s elections, his replacement, Péter Magyar, a former member of the Orban government, might not be on the EU’s side after all. The election was characterized as the EU versus national sovereignty movements, with Magyar representing the EU. But soon after winning, Magyar announced plans to double down on blocking immigration to the country.

EU must demand change under Péter Magyar before releasing billions in frozen funds rmx.news
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EXCERPT:

During a briefing on Hungary’s frozen EU funds, left-wing Dutch MEP Tineke Strik indicated that Brussels would not be in any rush to lift the punitive measures. The new Hungarian government, led by Tisza’s Péter Magyar, must first take concrete measures to restore what she claims are democracy, fundamental rights, freedom of speech, and legal certainty.

Strik’s comments were affirmed by German MEP Daniel Freund, also a member of the Greens, who was famously a vocal critic of the Hungarian government under Fidesz. At stake are Hungary’s voting rights, €35 billion, and millions in fines.

To unlock this money, the EU has already issued a 27 demands that Hungary must meet to receive its frozen funds, however, many of these demands already contradict campaign promises made by Magyar during his campaign, including his vow to restrict immigration.

At the press conference, Strik emphasized that it is not yet time to withdraw the punitive measures against Hungary, and she believes that the ongoing Article 7 procedure against Hungary should also not be withdrawn, meaning Hungary’s voting rights in the EU could still be withdrawn.

“We didn’t launch Article 7 because of Orbán, but because of the shortcomings of the system,” she told press.

Progressive Judge James Boasberg received an excoriating review from 2 of the 3 D.C. District Court panelists who ruled to end contempt proceedings against Trump administration officials.

The ruling declared, “The district court proposes to probe high-level Executive Branch deliberations about matters of national security and diplomacy. These proceedings are a clear abuse of discretion, as the district court’s order said nothing about transferring custody of the plaintiffs and therefore lacks the clarity to support criminal contempt based on the transfer of custody.”

Court Torches Boasberg For Targeting Trump Immigration Officials – The Federalist

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EXCERPT:

D.C. District Chief Judge James Boasberg suffered a humiliating legal defeat on Tuesday in his efforts to stymie President Trump’s deportation of illegal aliens from the United States.

In a 2-1 ruling, a three-judge panel for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals shot down the Obama appointee’s attempted criminal contempt proceedings against Trump administration officials involved in last year’s deportation of suspected Tren de Aragua gang members to El Salvador. More specifically, the panel granted the government’s request for a writ of mandamus, “a rare and extraordinary order from a higher court directing a lower court or government official to stop exceeding their authority,” as described by the Washington Examiner.

The D.C. Circuit panel had temporarily halted Boasberg’s criminal contempt proceedings against the administration back in December. As noted by Judge Neomi Rao in her Tuesday opinion, however, Boasberg nonetheless plowed ahead by “expand[ing]” his inquiry “to extract more information from government counsel about exactly what happened” throughout the aforementioned deportations.

Those actions, Rao summarized, amount to a “clear abuse of discretion” by Boasberg.

President Trump posted a meme depicting himself as Jesus while he was also in the midst of a back and forth with the Pope of the Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV. This followed his f bomb on Easter where he threatened to end the Iranian civilization. The President deleted the meme.

Blurb:

Trump casts himself as Jesus after attacking Pope – RT World News

The US president portrayed himself as a holy healer, while some noted a similarity between the man being healed and Jeffrey Epstein

US President Donald Trump has shared an AI-generated image of himself as a robed, Christ-like figure healing a bedridden man, flanked by eagles, fighter jets, and US service members, with the Statue of Liberty and the US flag in the background. The post triggered backlash, with some users suggesting the figure being healed resembled the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The image was posted on Truth Social on Sunday after Trump’s broadside at Pope Leo XIV, calling the Chicago-born pontiff “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”

In the picture, Trump – while lacking a halo – is seen wearing red and white drapes, colors symbolizing bloodshed and Christ’s sacrifice for humanity, as well as his absolute purity.

The Pope previously criticized the US-Israeli attack against Iran and described Trump’s threats to destroy Iranian civilization as “truly unacceptable,” saying it amounts to “a threat against the entire people.”

The 2019 Trump Impeachment was based on dubious, or fake evidence, concocted by Democrat partisans, or so a report from the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard suggest.

Tulsi Gabbard Just Declassified the Docs Behind the 2019 Trump Impeachment Effort townhall.com
News Source
EXCERPT:

The 2019 Trump impeachment effort was a sham — we all know this. There were traces of truth peeking through this Democrat-manufactured push, which alleges a quid pro quo based on hearsay. The details of this fiasco involved then-Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who chaired the House Intelligence Committee and lied about having contact with the whistleblower who started this circus. The allegations were based on hearsay, with the analyst admitting he was a committed Democrat. As you might expect, he also had a history of political bias. He fit right in with the Deep State actors trying to derail the first Trump presidency.