The Insider Report from The New American

Massie: Trump Violating the War Powers Act of 1973

The New York Times reported on July 23 that President Donald Trump’s Defense/War Department had lowered the number of American soldiers killed in the Iran War from 18 to 14. Eliminated from the list were four service members whose “deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.”

But why? “Let me explain this absurd ruse: The Pentagon is pretending there have been two Iran wars separated by a brief cease-fire,” Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) posted on X the next day. He continued: “The reality: By going more than 90 days without congressional authorization @SecWar IS BREAKING THE LAW and must be held accountable.”

Massie is referring to the War Powers Act of 1973, which states in Section 5(c): “At any time that United States Armed Forces are engaged in hostilities outside the territory of the United States, its possessions and territories without a declaration of war or specific statutory authorization, such forces shall be removed by the president if the Congress so directs by concurrent resolution.” It also requires in Section 5(b) that the president remove U.S. forces within 60 days unless Congress passes a declaration of war or authorizes the action — though he is allowed up to an additional 30 days if he “certifies to the Congress in writing that unavoidable military necessity respecting the safety of United States Armed Forces requires the continued use of such armed forces in the course of bringing about a prompt removal of such forces.”

On July 27, Fox News quoted Massie saying:

For the first time since the law was enacted, a concurrent resolution has passed in accordance with 5(c) of the law, but the White House has ignored it. It seems they’ve assumed the law is unconstitutional, but no court has ever found that to be the case, so the law remains on the books while the White House flouts it….

They’ve also violated section 5(b) of the law, but rather than ignore the law, they’ve perpetuated a ruse that the 60-day limit on Presidential military activity does not apply with respect to the Iran war, because each time they effect a temporary ceasefire, the statutory clock restarts. We believe no court would agree with this absurdity, and this should be litigated as well.

Because of the Trump administration’s violation of the War Powers Act, Massie is joining Democrats in supporting a new resolution to sue the executive branch over the Iran War. See a PDF of the resolution here.

Yet, it must be kept in mind, Trump’s actions in attacking Iran would still be unconstitutional even if the War Powers Act of 1973 did not exist. The Constitution delegates to Congress the power to declare war, and Trump sought no such declaration or authorization before launching his attack. — Gary Benoit

Trump Accuses Obama of Treason Over 2016 Russia Hoax

President Donald Trump recently accused former President Barack Obama of treason. The remarks, made during an event with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., referenced declassified documents released by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard concerning the Obama administration’s handling of intelligence on Russian election interference in 2016.

Trump stated: “The leader of the gang: Barack HUSSEIN Obama, have you heard of him?… HE’S GUILTY! It’s there! He’s guilty, this was TREASON.” He accused Obama of colluding with Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, James Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper, asserting that the group orchestrated efforts to undermine his 2016 campaign and presidency. Trump added, “We have all of the documents! Tulsi has thousands of additional documents coming!” He described Obama as the chief architect of the strategy.

The resurrection of what President Trump calls the “Russia Hoax” controversy revives debates from the 2016 election a decade ago.

His comments followed Gabbard’s declassification of documents alleging that Obama administration officials “manufactured and politicized” intelligence. These materials reportedly include communications from a December 2016 White House meeting involving top national security officials and a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian activities. Gabbard described this as a “treasonous conspiracy” aimed at subverting Trump’s election victory and initiating a “years-long coup,” and referred documents to the Department of Justice for potential prosecution.

Some, including Obama spokesman Patrick Rodenbush, dismissed the claims as “outrageous” and a “weak attempt at distraction,” doubling down on the now widely discredited Steele dossier and claims that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to aid Trump. This alleged interference consisted of a private company called the Internet Research Agency (whose owners were Russian nationals) spending roughly $46,000 on 3,000 Facebook and Instagram ads from mid-2015 to mid-2017, a tiny fraction compared to the $81 million spent by the Trump and Clinton campaigns combined on the platforms.

Analyses of the released ads showed that a significant portion promoted content supportive of Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton, while other ads backed Trump or stoked conservative grievances. The overarching goal, per U.S. intelligence and a 2019 report by special counsel Robert Mueller, was to sow discord, erode trust in institutions, and amplify polarization rather than solely run a pro-Trump media campaign. Regardless, $46,000 in Facebook ads didn’t make a blip on the radar screen of the billions spent cumulatively by both campaigns. — Rebecca Terrell

Libya Moves Off the U.S. Dollar

On July 19, the governor of the Central Bank of Libya, Naji Mohammed Issa, met his Chinese counterpart Pan Gongsheng in Beijing and signed an agreement connecting Libyan commercial banks to China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS). The agreement enables direct yuan-denominated transfers between Libya and China, eliminates the need to route transactions through intermediary dollar-based institutions, allows letters of credit to be opened directly through Chinese banks, and includes Libyan entry into China’s bond market. A bilateral banking forum is scheduled for early 2027, alongside the China-Africa Forum.

Libya is not a major economy. Its agreement with Beijing will not by itself shake the dollar’s foundations. But Libya is not the point — the pattern is.

To understand what CIPS represents, reference Edward Fishman’s Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare — the most important recent account of how the United States weaponized the international financial system after September 11, 2001.

Fishman traces how the dollar’s dominance over global trade created a structural choke point: Virtually every significant international financial transaction, regardless of which countries were involved, passed through American-controlled infrastructure, primarily the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) messaging system and corresponding American banks. This gave Washington the ability to sanction any country, company, or individual by simply cutting them off from that infrastructure, effectively barring them from the global economy without firing a shot.

Post-9/11, successive administrations, both Republican and Democratic, transformed this structural advantage into an aggressive instrument of foreign policy. Iran, Russia, Venezuela, North Korea, and dozens of other countries found themselves cut off from SWIFT, their assets frozen, and their central banks sanctioned. The message was that access to the global financial system is a privilege Washington can revoke.

Fishman’s argument is that this weapon is being dulled by its own overuse. Every country that has been sanctioned, and every country that watches sanctions applied to others, has acquired a powerful incentive to build alternative infrastructure that routes around American choke points. CIPS, launched by China in 2015, is the most significant institutional response to that incentive.

The dollar’s dominance following WWII rested on a specific historical condition: the United States as the unchallenged architect of the international order formalized at Bretton Woods in 1944. That order survived the Cold War because the Soviet alternative never offered a genuinely functional financial system. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the unipolar moment arrived — a world in which American financial infrastructure had no serious competitor.

That moment lasted approximately three decades. What ended it was not a single rival power, but the accumulated resentment of the Global South — countries that had experienced American financial power not as a liberating force but as a coercive one. Russia’s expulsion from SWIFT following the 2022 Ukraine invasion was the watershed moment. For the first time, a major economy with nuclear weapons and significant commodity exports was cut off from the dollar system entirely. The message heard in Beijing, Riyadh, New Delhi, and Ankara was not “Russia was punished for bad behavior,” but “any of us could be next.”

The BRICS expansion — adding the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Egypt, and Ethiopia to the original five members (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) — is the political expression of this realization. CIPS is its financial expression. The two are connected: a political bloc committed to multipolarity needs financial infrastructure that can survive American pressure. Libya joining CIPS is one more “brick” in the BRICS wall.

Libya’s case is particularly ironic. Its current government exists in significant part because of the 2011 NATO intervention, a war conducted without a congressional declaration, justified by humanitarian rhetoric, and executed through air power that destroyed the Gadhafi government. One of then-leader Moammar Gadhafi’s stated ambitions, documented in diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, was the creation of a gold-backed African currency to replace the dollar for oil transactions, an ambition that made him a target for overthrow. That is exactly the type of financial sovereignty Libya is now quietly pursuing through legitimate banking agreements with Beijing.

A country whose government was installed in the aftermath of an unauthorized American-backed intervention is now connecting its banking system to China’s alternative to SWIFT.

Economic expert Abu Bakr al-Tour, commenting on the Libya-China agreement, noted that he does not expect significant American pressure on this step “given the limited volume of trade between Libya and China.” He is almost certainly right in the short term, as Washington picks its battles and Libya-China bilateral trade is not worth a diplomatic confrontation.

But this is precisely how dollar hegemony erodes — not through a single dramatic confrontation, but through a thousand small agreements, each individually beneath the threshold of American response, collectively representing a structural shift in how the world moves money. Saudi Arabia accepting yuan for oil sales; India settling Russian energy purchases in rupees; the UAE deepening CIPS connections; Brazil and China trading directly in their own currencies; and now Libya.

The dollar will not fall in a day. But as Fishman documents, the choke points that gave Washington its extraordinary leverage are being systematically routed around, built over, tunneled under, and bypassed by a Global South that has watched American financial power deployed as a weapon often enough to invest seriously in alternatives. — Rebecca Terrell

Pisistratus Rides Again

Athens ran this con 26 centuries ago. We are still falling for it.

Polybius promised that any man who grasps cause and effect and reads history can foretell the future of any nation. We have quit reading history, so the future ambushes us. Twenty-six centuries ago Athens staged the entire drama we are living now. We simply were not taught to watch.

Solon gave Athens a constitution and sailed away for 10 years. The moment his sail dropped below the horizon, the city fractured into three factions: the Men of the Hills, poor and shut out of power; the Men of the Coast, merchants grown rich; and the Men of the Plains, the old wealth that had always ruled. Each craved a change that would lift itself above the others. Envy did the rest.

Then came Pisistratus, a Man of the Plains. Aristotle labeled him an extreme democrat. Plutarch marveled that he could counterfeit feelings he did not possess. Herodotus called him cunning. He made himself the champion of the poor. He was nothing of the sort.

Study the mechanics, because they have not changed. Pisistratus warned the Hills that the Coast was strangling their share of power. He warned the Coast that the Hills were about to riot. He coaxed the weapons out of the frightened Coast, then slipped them to the Hills so the blood would run, then pointed to it as proof that only he could restore order. The terrified Coast voted him a personal bodyguard and a standing force. They surrendered their liberty and christened it “safety.”

Now watch who bleeds. Through every fire and every riot, one faction is never singed. The men who strike the match are never standing near the flame. Look closely at whoever marches at the head of today’s Men of the Hills. You will find a Man of the Plains, and he will not lose a single window.

Secure at last, Pisistratus enacted his reforms. He cut taxes on the poor and raised them on the small landholder. He taxed land to fund welfare. He fixed a minimum wage and offered farm subsidies. He extended the vote to noncitizens. He changed the number of judges. He bribed foreign governments using the public treasury. And he compelled the fathers of Athens to send their sons to schools that he funded and he ruled.

Twenty-six hundred years. Nothing new under the sun.

Ask yourself why you never heard his name, or why you never read the Constitution of Athens. There is your answer. We have marched our children into Pisistratus’ schools for a hundred years. No tyrant teaches the young to spot the tyrant.

Stop swallowing the bait. The two parties you are trained to hate are the left and right hands of one body. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon saw the trick three centuries ago, writing in Cato’s Letters:

They will create parties in the commonwealth, or keep them up where they already are; and, by playing them by turns upon each other, will rule both.

Refuse disarmament under every pretext. The surrendered sword is never returned to you; it is handed to your neighbor and turned against your chest. It has been the tyrant’s first tool since Athens, and has never once failed him.

Pull the children out of his schools, whatever the cost. We cannot be ignorant and free, yet we send our young back to the same bench and pray for a different harvest. That is not devotion. It is insanity.

When Athens finally felt its chains, the people ran to Solon, then in his 90s, and begged him to save them. He met them on his porch and read them their own verdict:

If now you suffer, do not blame the Gods,

For they are good, and all the fault is yours.

All your weapons and powers you put into [the tyrant’s] hands,

And now his slaves must do what he commands.

Learn it now. Solon will not walk onto our porch. And by the time we go looking for him, it will already be too late. — Joe Wolverton II, J.D.

Power Companies Leverage Eminent Domain to Clear Land for AI Data-center Transmission Lines

As the artificial-intelligence boom drives explosive demand for computing power, utilities across the United States are turning to eminent domain to secure rights-of-way for new high-voltage transmission lines. Private landowners, including families with generational homes and farms, face the prospect of forced property sales or seizures to accommodate infrastructure primarily serving energy-hungry data centers.

A prominent example is unfolding in Georgia, where utility giant Georgia Power is building a new 500-kilovolt transmission corridor known as Project Wansley. The project spans roughly 35 miles and requires acquiring or obtaining easements on more than 300 parcels of land in Coweta and Fayette counties. The company estimates that 70 to 80 percent of the power capacity on the new line will support data centers, with the remaining 20 to 30 percent allocated for residential and commercial growth.

Ansley Brown, whose family home in Coweta County is among those affected, described the situation as devastating. Built during her childhood, the house represented “true generational wealth.” After negotiations, her mother agreed to sell to avoid court-ordered seizure. Brown called the process “theft,” noting the imbalance of power against a major utility. “We don’t have the money to fight Georgia Power,” she told CBS News.

Eminent domain allows governments or authorized entities, such as regulated utilities, to take private property for public use with “just compensation.” Utilities argue that grid expansion serves a broad public purpose by enhancing reliability and meeting overall energy demand, even when large industrial loads such as data centers are the primary drivers.

Railroad companies serve as historic precedent. Prior to the Civil War, they frequently received delegated eminent-domain authority from states to overcome holdout problems, allowing them to secure rights-of-way for lines that promised connectivity, commerce, and growth. Authorities saw the expansion of supply chains as critical to the national economy. In a foreshadowing of today’s AI dilemma, railroad companies would line their corridors with telegraph wires, abetting long-distance communication. So ambitious were they to build out this infrastructure that they trampled the rights of Southern farmers and landholders, tensions that helped lead to the Civil War.

Landowners then, as now, decried inadequate compensation, disruption of generational holdings, and the prioritization of powerful corporate interests over average people. In fact, Abraham Lincoln was a railroad lawyer whose early Senate runs and presidential campaigns were bankrolled by railroad trusts.

Today, Georgia Power states it uses eminent domain only as a last resort, typically in less than one percent of transactions, and prefers negotiated purchases. Spokesperson Holly Lovett has emphasized transparency and good-faith efforts.

The Georgia case is part of a larger $16 billion grid expansion plan approved by state regulators, including nearly 10 gigawatts of new generation capacity to address surging demand. Similar tensions are emerging nationwide. In Virginia, Washington, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and elsewhere, projects tied to hyperscale data centers operated by major tech firms have sparked landowner opposition. Homeowners and farmers report offers they view as undervalued, as well as concerns over property devaluation, tree removal, visual impacts from tall towers, and the prioritization of corporate interests.

Landowners such as those in Georgia are raising awareness through social media and community efforts, arguing that the human and community costs — displaced families, lost farmland, and altered rural landscapes — deserve greater scrutiny. — Rebecca Terrell

The Latest Narrative on Ahmadinejad’s Alleged Mossad Ties and House Arrest

In mid-July, a major new narrative emerged around former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, centered on claims of secret collaboration with Israeli intelligence. According to a New York Times report citing senior Iranian and U.S. officials, Israel conducted a years-long covert operation to cultivate Ahmadinejad as a potential post-regime-change leader.

The story alleges that Israeli operatives engaged with Ahmadinejad abroad (such as in Budapest during a 2024 climate conference and later in 2025). Israel reportedly provided financial support for his housing and travel. The plan allegedly culminated during the early days of the U.S.-Israel military campaign against Iran in late February 2026. An Israeli airstrike targeted Ahmadinejad’s compound, after which Mossad agents supposedly extracted him to a safe house. The story goes that he grew disillusioned and left under unclear circumstances.

Iranian authorities, per the report, later uncovered these contacts, leading the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence wing to place him under house arrest. This narrative frames Ahmadinejad, a vocal anti-Zionist and Holocaust denier during his presidency (2005-2013), as a surprising potential asset for regime change who might have normalized relations with Israel.

However, Ahmadinejad’s office strongly rejected the Times’ claims as “Hollywood-style” fabrications and “fake news,” stating he remained active in his daily work. He made public appearances, including at commemorative events for slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in early July, where he was filmed on state television appearing engaged but subdued. His re-emergence followed months of absence and rumors of his death, raising questions about his exact status.

This latest story fits into a pattern of swirling, unverified claims about Ahmadinejad amid Iran’s turbulent politics and the recent Iran-Israel-U.S. conflict. Back in June, claims circulated in Western media that Ahmadinejad, his wife, and children were assassinated in Tehran by unknown gunmen at point-blank range. Earlier in March, during the height of reported strikes, media outlets reported that Ahmadinejad had been killed in Israeli airstrikes. His office and associates quickly denied these reports.

Iranian state-affiliated media also initially reported his death in strikes near his home in the war’s opening phase (late February), though authorities issued no official confirmation. His surprise appearance at Khamenei’s funeral in July 2026 was widely described as “back from the dead,” dispelling those earlier reports.

These shifting stories — assassination, death in airstrikes, secret Mossad collaboration, and house arrest — may have something to do with Ahmadinejad’s long and contentious relationship with the supreme leadership and IRGC. He has been sidelined in recent elections, but his apparent reappearances underscore his role as a populist figure. — Rebecca Terrell

The Law by Frédéric Bastiat

Frédéric Bastiat wrote The Law in 1850, while tuberculosis was finishing him. He had months left and no patience for euphemism. What he produced in that shadow is one of the most powerful, concise, and devastating indictments ever written against legalized theft, bureaucratic benevolence, and sanctified tyranny: the whole gilded apparatus that struts about in our own day under the name of “public policy.”

His argument is not complicated. That is the source of its power. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men made laws. Men made laws because life, liberty, and property existed first. The law is nothing more than the organized right of individual self-defense, pooled for convenience and for nothing else. It possesses no power that the individual did not first possess and lend to it. You may not rob your neighbor. Therefore 10,000 of your neighbors, having voted, may not rob him either. Not by statute. Not by subsidy. Not by any program bearing a noble name. Not by the tender mercies of an agency whose officers have never met the man they are ruining.

Bastiat gave us the test, and it is a simple one. Look and see whether the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to others to whom it does not belong. See whether the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what that citizen could not do himself without committing a crime. That is legal plunder, and no vote sanctifies it. Washington calls it compassion, and mails the invoice to your grandchildren.

Bastiat saw the deeper corruption, too. The legislator who fancies himself a sculptor and mankind his clay. The reformer who begins by pitying the people and ends by disposing of them. The state, in his immortal phrase, as the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else. Cicero warned of the descent. So did Madison. Bastiat simply refused to be polite about it.

This book is not merely a classic. It is a weapon: sharp, moral, timeless, and urgently needed. It is short enough to read in an afternoon and strong enough to reorder a lifetime of assumptions. Read it. Mark it. Teach it to your children before the schools teach them the opposite. And never forget the lesson at its center: a free people must keep the law chained to justice, or soon enough the law will chain the people.

Reading it, however, is not enough. Bastiat had a pen. You have a Republic to save, and pens do not save republics by themselves. For nearly seven decades The John Birch Society has done the unglamorous work that liberty actually requires: educating neighbors, organizing chapters, holding legislators to the constitutional text, and exposing the plunderers by name.

So do not merely admire the argument. Enlist in it. Join The John Birch Society. Then put this book into another man’s hands. To order the book, go to shopJBS.org. — Joe Wolverton II, J.D.

Foreign Adversaries’ Creeping Acquisition of U.S. Farmland Places Trump at Odds With His Own Party

Some GOP congressmen are at odds with President Donald Trump over an important national security issue: restricting Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland. In May, Representative John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), introduced bipartisan legislation titled “Protecting U.S. Farmland and Sensitive Sites from Foreign Adversaries Act.” The bill would block property acquisitions by China and others such as Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and would extend beyond U.S. farmland to include seaports, telecom infrastructure, and property near military installations.

Trump has pushed back against restrictions, arguing they could depress land values and harm farmers. Nevertheless, his own agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, has publicly highlighted the dangers of “the consolidation of our farmland” and adversarial foreign ownership “creeping up on our country.” Ironically, her warnings align with the Trump administration’s broader National Farm Security Action Plan, which treats food security as national security.

The numbers might seem small at first glance: Chinese-linked entities control roughly 250,000 to 300,000 acres out of America’s nearly 900 million acres of farmland. Foreign ownership overall accounts for only about three percent of U.S. agricultural land, with China representing a fraction of that. Yet Chinese-held acreage has surged more than 400 percent since 2010, and raw totals understate the threat. Strategic location matters far more than sheer quantity. Parcels near military bases or critical infrastructure pose outsized risks to America’s defense and supply chains.

A prime example remains the 2022 attempt by a Chinese company to build a corn-milling plant near Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota — a wake-up call for lawmakers concerned about espionage and supply-chain vulnerabilities.

With Congress stalled between the president’s economic concerns and a bipartisan, security-focused bloc, states are stepping up. Roughly half have enacted restrictions on foreign ownership of agricultural land. In 2026 so far, more than two dozen states have considered new measures. Utah provides a clear success story: Republican Governor Spencer Cox signed legislation strengthening bans on adversarial purchases, blocking a deal near Provo Airport involving Cirrus Aircraft, a company majority-owned by a Chinese state-run defense contractor tied to the People’s Liberation Army.

Critics of the state-by-state approach warn of a regulatory patchwork, and some invoke outdated “alien land laws” of the early 20th century. Supporters rightly counter that today’s laws target CCP-linked entities and other foreign adversaries, not law-abiding individuals based on ethnicity.

U.S. farmland is the backbone of America’s food security and economic independence. Allowing adversaries, especially the CCP (which has openly pursued strategies to destabilize the United States), to gain footholds on U.S. soil undermines sovereignty and grants a hostile foreign power future leverage over the American people. American land should serve American interests. Anything less risks trading away the very foundation of our independence. — Rebecca Terrell

Geoeconomic Fragmentation in a Low-trust World

As a progressivist, social scientist Robert Putnam hid data for more than a decade — data from his research indicating that, as a society gets more diverse, its social trust erodes. Different, oft-conflicting ethical frameworks among people lead to clashes, a drop in civic engagement, and social isolation.

What is true in the microcosm is true in the macrocosm. The global economy is shifting from post-Cold War integration toward a fragmented, “low-trust” order where nations scramble in a race to obtain finite resources and engage in underhanded practices to obtain them. Geopolitical shocks, particularly Strait of Hormuz disruptions, have accelerated this trend. Governments now weaponize trade, resources, and technology, leading to supply-chain reshoring and heightened risks of coercion.

Mike Adams summed up the danger:

Our current global population of 8+ billion people is only alive because of a supply chain infrastructure built up over the last 60 years or so which saw dramatic scaling of natural gas extraction infrastructure (largely in Qatar and North America), dramatic improvements in oil extraction from existing Persian Gulf wells, and a tremendous amount of downstream chemistry that processes raw gas and oil to produce critical substances for our world such as helium, sulfuric acid, phosphate fertilizers, nitrogenous fertilizers, polyethylene, naphtha, aluminum smelting and so on.

If the supply chain fails, it will imperil billions of people.

Geoeconomic fragmentation, nevertheless, is taking place, manifesting as “friend-shoring” and strategic decoupling. Countries diversify away from vulnerable global chains, especially in critical minerals, semiconductors, and energy. The Middle East disruptions — oil price surges, shipping reroutes, and export controls — exposed dependencies, prompting nations to rebuild domestic or allied capacities. Analyses by the International Monetary fund (IMF) and the United Nations Trade and Development office (UNCTAD) note slowed trade growth and uneven impacts hitting developing economies hardest through higher energy and food costs.

Coercive economics has become a primary tool. The U.S. employs tariffs, sanctions, and export controls; China restricts rare earths and magnets; others nationalize lithium or curb exports of nickel and bauxite. This “low-trust” environment replaces rules-based multilateralism with bilateral leverage and resource denial. Amundi Research describes a world in which resilience trumps efficiency, with persistent conflict risks and coercive measures as standard policy.

For the United States, this presents both challenges and opportunities. Reshoring and “America First” industrial policy can bring jobs back to America, reduce reliance on adversaries, and bolster critical sectors. However, prolonged fragmentation risks an erosion of the larger global supply chain, higher consumer costs, and slower growth. Supply shocks compound domestic pressures on groceries and energy.

Critics of globalism argue this fragmentation validates long-standing warnings against entangling alliances and the system-fragility of one-world economic schemes. Multilateral institutions struggle as powers compete for choke points in energy, minerals, and technology. The result is a more volatile system prone to cascading disruptions and resource wars.

America’s response should emphasize constitutional principles of self-government and a quiet, thoughtful return to the original system of robustness that the United States enjoyed prior to “interdependence” in the larger global grid. There is a political cost to being overly reliant on other nations and the international institutions that manage them. As trust erodes internationally and globalism starts to violently unwind, renewed focus on American self-reliance becomes not just an economic strategy, but a defense of the Republic. — Rebecca Terrell

Economic Pressures: Gas Prices, Inflation, and “Freedom Fuel” Initiatives

As of late July, American drivers are facing renewed pain at the pump, with national average gasoline prices climbing toward or exceeding $4 per gallon. The primary driver is the escalation of U.S. military involvement in the Iran conflict, which has disrupted oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, triggered retaliatory attacks on shipping, and prompted the revocation of Iranian oil export waivers. This has tightened global petroleum supplies and sent shock waves through energy markets already strained by other geopolitical tensions, including the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.

Additionally, while headline inflation has moderated slightly in recent years, energy volatility now risks reversing disinflation trends. Higher fuel costs ripple through the economy, increasing transportation expenses for goods, food, and services. Families and small businesses feel the squeeze, particularly in rural and suburban areas dependent on personal vehicles. Critics argue that heavy federal spending, regulatory burdens on domestic energy production, and lingering effects of green energy mandates have left the United States more vulnerable to foreign shocks despite its status as a net energy exporter. Promises of “energy dominance” appear tested by global entanglements that drive up costs for ordinary citizens.

In response, the Trump administration has promoted “Freedom Fuel” initiatives, including networks of star-spangled gas stations aimed at offering discounted fuel through alternative sourcing and branding. Proponents tout these as practical steps toward lower prices and reduced reliance on adversarial suppliers. However, skeptics question whether such ventures can meaningfully offset larger market forces, and draw attention to the Trump administration depleting America’s strategic oil reserves to fool the public by artificially increasing supply.

Compounding public frustration are anecdotal and emerging reports of fuel-quality issues. In shortage scenarios, some stations are increasing additives such as ethanol or introducing extenders to bulk up supplies without raising prices, which may be politically or contractually constrained. These cheap additives lead to increased engine breakdowns.

The concern is that such measures mask the direct link between overseas conflicts and domestic shortages. Drivers may attribute poor performance (e.g., reduced mileage, injector issues, or premature wear) to bad luck or vehicle problems rather than adulterated fuel stemming from policy-driven supply constraints. This obscures accountability for decisions entangling the United States in distant wars that elevate energy costs and degrade product quality. Whether in response to Iranian disruptions or Russian supply strains, the pattern suggests that hidden adjustments burden consumers while shielding larger geopolitical strategies from scrutiny.

“Guns and butter” was the slogan employed in the Vietnam War era embodying this conflict between domestic luxuries and war-induced privation. In 2026, the phrase might be changed to the dilemma of “guns and gasoline.” — Rebecca Terrell