September 3, 2026 Insider Report

Trump’s Beef With Foreign Countries and Food Producers

U.S. President Donald Trump announced in August that his administration will temporarily allow more foreign beef into the U.S. tariff-free, with the aim of lowering grocery prices ahead of November’s midterms. He hasn’t said which countries will receive relief from the tariffs — only that “there are a few” that send “the highest quality beef.” A White House official said unnamed foreign exporters have agreed to a 25-percent discount, with an executive order formalizing a roughly 300,000-metric-ton import quota.

America’s cattle industry, usually a reliable Trump constituency, is furious. National Cattlemen’s Beef Association CEO Colin Woodall said flooding the market with subsidized foreign beef isn’t the way to rebuild the U.S. herd after years of drought and rising costs. U.S. Cattlemen’s Association president Justin Tupper went further, warning that the move “will weaken our markets and gamble with food safety.” Even Republican senators from cattle country, including Nebraska’s Deb Fischer, have publicly broken with the president over it.

The further irony is that the price pressure Trump’s latest policy is meant to relieve is substantially a product of the wars Trump himself is now prosecuting or sustaining.

The Iran conflict has closed off much of the Strait of Hormuz, through which Gulf countries ship roughly half the world’s traded urea and nearly a third of traded ammonia. Fertilizer analysts note that global diesel prices jumped 36 percent year-on-year in July, largely tied to that Hormuz disruption, and global fertilizer prices are projected to climb more than 20 percent this year. Layer that on top of the ongoing Ukraine war, which has repeatedly disrupted Black Sea grain shipments and Russian and Ukrainian fertilizer exports, together accounting for close to 30 percent of the global wheat trade. Experts at Oxford Economics now forecast global food prices rising nearly 12 percent in 2026, with wheat alone up 36 percent year-on-year. Nitrogen fertilizer prices specifically have climbed sharply since the United States, Israel, and Iran began fighting in February.

In other words: Energy costs, shipping costs, and fertilizer costs are all elevated in significant part because of conflicts in which this administration is actively involved. Those costs flow directly into the price of food on American shelves.

Retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor has argued that ordinary Americans largely aren’t following the geopolitics, but are noticing its downstream effects, saying in an interview, “A friend of mine just came back from upstate New York where he’s from, and he spent a lot of time up there — Utica and north all the way up to the Canadian border — traveling around seeing friends, and he said no one up there is even remotely interested in anything in the Iranian conflict. He said most of them don’t pay much attention to it, but they are paying attention to the rises in fuel prices, the changes in the price of food.”

So a beef deal timed just ahead of the midterms looks less like wise agricultural policy and more like a cheap trick to manage the symptoms of a problem Trump created, without him admitting guilt.

In (we hope) unrelated news, Israel became the first country in the world in 2024 to approve commercial sale of cell-cultured lab-grown beef, and has recently cleared regulatory hurdles to allow startups such as Aleph Farms to sell the fake food. Whether this plays some part in the Trump administration being cagey about naming the countries that the beef is coming from remains to be seen. — Rebecca Terrell

UN Committee Demands Reparations for Slavery, Urges Indoctrination in Critical Race Theory

Countries and private organizations are legally obligated to “provide reparatory justice” — including monetary reparations — and impose the ideology of radical critical race theory on children and citizens to compensate for the transatlantic slave trade, according to a United Nations committee.

On August 31, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) published a general recommendation “on reparatory justice for the harms and continuing consequences of colonialism, the trafficking in enslaved Africans across the Atlantic and other routes, and racialized chattel slavery.” The report alleges that “anti-Black racism” and “structural inequality” remain alive and well, and that countries must address them through reparations.

Additionally, CERD’s report claims that the UN’s International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted in 1965, requires its 182 participating countries to “take special measures to eliminate structural racism and inequalities resulting from transatlantic chattel slavery.” CERD furthermore argues that “denying effective reparatory justice is itself a distinct form of racial discrimination and violates … the Convention.”

The report alleges that countries must provide reparations both to “people of African descent” and to “successor States to former colonies that continued domestic regimes of slavery,” i.e., most Third World governments.

And financial reparations are not enough. The report demands that countries “implement comprehensive reparatory measures … covering all aspects of remedies,” including “monetary, non-monetary and structural.” Such measures include indoctrinating children with a leftist historical narrative, criminalizing “hate speech” and “xenophobia towards migrants and others perceived as such,” only displaying public monuments that “honour the contributions of people of African descent” and condemn anyone “who supported or benefited from” slavery, and establishing truth commissions on the slave trade.

CERD calls for forcing private organizations — including churches, companies, banks, and universities — to provide their own reparations, and urges countries to enact legislation mandating that such organizations “investigate and disclose their historical involvement; provide free and effective access to relevant records and archives; engage in truth-telling; publicly acknowledge their roles and any benefits derived from those practices; and issue meaningful apologies.”

In other words, it’s not an exaggeration to say that CERD’s recommendations would result in imposing cultural Marxism and draconian government mandates on virtually all of society.

In its report, CERD promotes a radical version of critical race theory, which, in addition to being factually incorrect, diminishes the West’s critical contribution to human freedom, essentially teaches people to hate their countries (at least if they live in Western countries), and divides individuals based on skin color.

The report also demonstrates how the UN threatens individual freedom and national sovereignty. A common criticism heard about the UN is that it is “ineffective” and “all talk, no action.” However, an “effective” UN — one powerful enough to impose CERD’s demands on countries and their citizens — would be far worse. Although the UN is, thankfully, not strong enough today to force the United States to comply, Reuters reported that CERD’s report “may be cited in courtrooms.”

Another statement often heard is that the UN has “veered off course” and that it must “return to its original mission.” However, the UN’s original mission, as intended by its founders, was to serve as a nascent one-world government, a goal it is still striving toward.

Instead of trying to “reform” the UN, the United States should get out of it completely. Legislation to do just that, the DEFUND Act (H.R. 1498 and S. 669), is currently pending in Congress. — Peter Rykowski

Congress Wants to Make America’s WHO Exit Permanent

In January the United States formally completed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO). In a joint statement, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the U.S. government had terminated all funding to the WHO and severed its membership, citing the agency’s mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic, its refusal to implement meaningful reforms, and the deference it showed to the Chinese Communist Party’s claims about the supposed Wuhan outbreak.

The withdrawal is linked to an executive order President Trump signed on his first day back in office, giving formal notice as required by the terms of the 1948 joint resolution under which the United States originally joined the WHO. With that one-year-notice period now expired, HHS says the exit is final: no more American funding and no more American health policy dictated by an organization unaccountable to the people. HHS has stated that the United States intends to continue engaging in global health efforts on a bilateral basis, outside WHO structures.

The White House also issued a January presidential memorandum directing U.S. withdrawal from 66 international organizations (35 non-UN bodies and 31 UN-affiliated entities), signaling a break from automatic participation in multilateral institutions.

But leaving the WHO does not guarantee a future administration won’t walk right back in; that’s the gap Congressman Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) has spent three Congresses trying to close. His “No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act” would deem any pandemic-related convention or agreement produced by the WHO’s International Negotiating Body a treaty under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, meaning it would require ratification by two-thirds of the Senate, not merely an executive signature or an HHS secretary’s signoff.

Tiffany’s bill has bipartisan traction. First introduced in 2023, it passed the House 219-199 in 2024, with four Democrats joining Republicans, only to stall in the then-Democrat-controlled Senate. Tiffany reintroduced it in 2025, noting that even though the Trump administration itself declined to sign the WHO’s pandemic agreement (adopted at the 78th World Health Assembly earlier that year), the prior administration had signaled it would have signed on. That, Tiffany argued, is exactly the scenario his bill is designed to prevent: a future president committing the country to a binding global health regime without ever bringing it to the Senate.

The Heritage Foundation has flagged a provision buried in the WHO’s pandemic agreement itself: a withdrawal clause requiring a two-year waiting period after the treaty takes effect before a member state can even begin the one-year-notice process to leave — a built-in mechanism, critics argue, that could make any future exit far more difficult than the one the United States just completed. — Rebecca Terrell

NATO’s Secret Role in Maintaining the Post-WWII System

Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Roxane Towner-Watkins shared a video in August featuring Lawrence Wilkerson, a former U.S. Army colonel and chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, describing extensive Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), U.K. Military Intelligence (MI6), and related influence operations that shaped postwar European politics, media, labor unions, and leadership. Towner-Watkins added: “The CIA funded the creation of the European Movement leading to the EU and the Euro. The Marshall Plan was an extortion plan with [the] covert element of the Gladio/NATO stay behind networks to control entire European governments and assassinate the head of state if necessary (and yes that includes the US as part of NATO).”

This observation casts a new light on theories about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Kennedy fired CIA Director Allen Dulles after Dulles usurped presidential authority in staging, without White House authorization, the Bay of Pigs operation to remove the Castro government in Cuba. A power struggle then ensued between the old American Republic and the new, post-World War II apparatus that had been erected in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (Significantly, the CIA was created in 1947, and NATO in 1949.)

If Dulles wanted to retaliate against Kennedy, the avenues to do so were in place by 1963. Before his dismissal, Allen Dulles worked alongside his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, sharing intelligence and aligning covert operations with NATO. The logistics for the assassination of a U.S. president who was deemed “dangerous to the post-war consensus” may have been run through NATO back channels, if one allows for Towner-Watkins’ understanding of postwar control structures.

Her assertions regarding NATO’s unwholesome potentialities are built on documented history. Operation Gladio refers to clandestine “stay-behind” paramilitary networks established in the late 1940s and 1950s across NATO countries and some neutral states. Coordinated in part through NATO structures such as the Allied Clandestine Committee and Clandestine Planning Committee of Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), these groups were created by the CIA and MI6 in collaboration with national military intelligence services. Their official purpose was to organize resistance, sabotage, and guerrilla warfare in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

Italian parliamentary investigations in the 1990s confirmed the networks’ existence, arms caches, and dual role: preparing for external occupation while also addressing perceived internal “emergency situations,” particularly the rise of opposition to Atlanticist powers.

In Italy, elements linked to Gladio have been associated with the “strategy of tension” — right-wing terrorist attacks blamed on the Left to influence public opinion and politics. Similar stay-behind structures operated under different names elsewhere (e.g., in Belgium, Greece, and Turkey). Allen Dulles, as CIA director and earlier Office of Strategic Services (OSS) figure, played a central role in organizing these networks.

The CIA, through the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE), on whose board Allen Dulles served as vice chairman, provided substantial covert funding to the European Movement in the 1940s and 1950s in order to promote Continental integration as a bulwark against communism. Marshall Plan counterpart funds were sometimes diverted to support related political and intelligence activities.

Tucker Carlson, in expressing frustration at the continued government coverup of the Kennedy assassination, said, “Why in the world would we be continuing to hide the truth about the Kennedy assassination 60 years later?… Of course the answer is obvious: because it implicates not individuals but institutions, and reveals them as complicit in a murder and in the overthrow of the U.S. government.”

If what Towner-Watkins and Wilkerson say is true, then yes: Secrecy and obscurantism would be the logical outgrowth of a post-WWII apparatus that became the backbone of the modern international governance and finance system. Marshall Plan money that went to create the powerful Eurodollar market in London would also have been used to wash narcotics money and hire assassination units from the Gladio network to deal with any leader who meddled against the emerging power structure. Stealth and concealment would have been necessary tools in keeping the American people from understanding what NATO really is and what it actually does. — Rebecca Terrell

Icelandic Voters Reject Proposal to Restart EU-membership Talks

In a victory for national sovereignty, Icelandic voters on August 29 rejected a proposal to restart negotiations to join the European Union (EU).

In a nationwide referendum, 52.8 percent of voters rejected the proposal, while 47.2 percent voted in favor. Voter turnout stood at 82.5 percent. Although voters in Reykjavík, the capital city, supported the proposal, rural voters strongly opposed it.

Opponents of EU membership emphasized that Iceland would lose its sovereignty — particularly its control over its waters, threatening the country’s fishing industry — if it joined the supranational bloc.

Conservative leaders in Europe celebrated the result. For example, Nigel Farage, who spearheaded Brexit in the United Kingdom, posted on X, “Congratulations to Iceland on voting to keep their independence.” And Marine Le Pen, a leading contender for France’s presidency next year, noted, “At a time when some are pushing for greater federalism and the transfer of sovereignty to the European Commission, this vote reminds us that another Europe is possible.”

The European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, merely noted that it “respects the choice of the Icelandic people” and that “Iceland remains a close partner of the European Union.”

Iceland applied for EU membership in 2009 under a socialist government. In 2013, however, after the country elected a conservative-leaning government, it froze talks with the EU. In 2015, Iceland’s foreign minister wrote a letter withdrawing its application, although the EU claimed it remained valid. The country’s current, socialist-led government, elected in 2024, pledged to hold a referendum on EU membership.

Following the referendum’s results, Icelandic Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir, who spearheaded the referendum, suggested that Iceland’s parliament would consider formally withdrawing the country’s EU-membership application.

Iceland is already highly integrated in EU institutions. For example, it is a member of the European Economic Area, which requires the country to adopt EU laws, as well as the Schengen Area, which eliminated border controls between member states.

Although Iceland will avoid EU membership — at least for the time being — it must go further and reclaim the sovereignty that it has already surrendered to the bloc. Rather than allowing their country to gradually be swallowed by an emerging “United States of Europe,” Icelanders must stand up for individual freedom and national independence. — Peter Rykowski

Trump Allies Signal Midterm Concerns as Kushner Meets Jeffries Amid Iran War Fallout

As the 2026 midterms approach, President Donald Trump’s administration faces mounting pressure due to economic strain from an unpopular war with Iran. The six-month-and-counting conflict has disrupted oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, contributing to inflation and higher energy prices. Republican strategists link these factors to declining approval for the president and risks to GOP control of Congress.

Reports indicate that Trump’s son-in-law and informal advisor Jared Kushner recently held a private meeting with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). According to multiple accounts, the discussion in New York City covered potential areas of common ground, including housing, immigration, and the high cost of living. Kushner reportedly suggested that Jeffries follow up with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Neither principal has publicly detailed the conversation, though Jeffries issued a statement criticizing Republican governance without confirming the sit-down.

Notably, Kushner has served as an unconstitutional (never confirmed by the Senate) envoy and point man in negotiations surrounding the Iran conflict. A shadow-emissary, he has been involved in back-channel talks, efforts to manage the memorandum of understanding with Iran, and related diplomatic outreach in the Middle East. Now, he is the figure engaging Jeffries.

Democrats are favored in some forecasts to regain the House, which would position Jeffries as potential speaker, and analysts describe his meeting with Kushner as an effort by Trump’s entourage to explore working relationships ahead of a possible shift in congressional power. Anxious conservative skeptics wonder if a quid pro quo is being set up, such as the Trump administration seeking to trade mass amnesty in exchange for assurance that Democrats won’t impeach the president.

Trump himself has publicly downplayed any midterm impact from the Iran war, stating that electoral considerations would not dictate his approach and expressing confidence that Americans remain “impressed.” Yet Republican anxiety is evident: Rising gasoline prices, household-energy cost pressures estimated in the hundreds of dollars, and the war’s prolonged nature do not sit well in an election cycle focused on the economy. — Rebecca Terrell

The Cobra Effect

Delhi under British rule had a snake problem. The colonial government, gifted with the administrative genius of an empire and cursed with an ignorance of men, announced a bounty. Bring in a dead cobra, collect a coin. The plan was clean on paper. Paper is where most plans stay clean.

The people of Delhi were poor, not stupid. Within a season they were breeding cobras in back rooms and courtyards, raising snakes the way a farmer raises hens, harvesting the treasury instead of the field. When the administrators discovered the trade, they canceled the bounty. The breeders, left holding worthless stock, opened the cages. Delhi finished with more cobras than it started with, and the government could point to a ledger of thousands of dead snakes as proof of its diligence.

Economists have since given this a name. They call it the Cobra Effect. The name is modern. The lesson is ancient.

Plutarch records that Gaius Gracchus bound the affection of Rome to himself with grain, selling corn to the citizens below its worth and charging the difference to the public purse. The law was generous. The motive was mixed. The result was permanent. What Gracchus sold at a discount, later men gave away outright, and within a few generations the Roman poor had traded a birthright for a ration and a seat at the games. The dole did not relieve the mob. It manufactured one.

Benjamin Franklin saw the same machinery at work in the English poor laws and described it without flinching:

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course [they] became poorer.

That was 1766. In 1965 we tried it again, at a scale Franklin could not have imagined and with a confidence he would have found comical. The Great Society did not invent poverty relief. It industrialized it, and wrote into the statutes an incentive so plain that only an expert could miss it: The welfare check was larger when the father was gone. Aid to Families with Dependent Children paid for his absence. Caseworkers were dispatched to confirm it. A nation that claimed to be fighting for the family put a bounty on its dissolution and then expressed astonishment at the harvest.

The benefit cliff finished the work. Take a raise, lose the housing subsidy. Take a second job, lose the medical card. Marry the father of your children, lose both. The arithmetic punishes precisely the behavior the program was sold to encourage, and the poor, who are not stupid either, do the arithmetic. Every welfare state teaches its clients the one lesson it never intended: Dependence pays better than industry.

Here the modern case turns darker than Delhi. The cobra farmers had to hide their sheds. Our bureaucracies publish their caseloads in glossy annual reports and call the number “need.” A rising roll is not treated in Washington as evidence of failure. It is next year’s appropriation. The British at least canceled the bounty when they saw what it had bred. We expand ours, and we name the expansion “compassion.”

James Madison warned that a Congress permitted to spend for the general welfare, unbound by the Constitution’s enumerated powers, would be a Congress with no boundaries at all, free to take into its own hands the education of children, the care of the poor, and the whole domestic life of the states. He was not predicting cruelty. He was predicting this: unlimited power exercised with the best of intentions, producing the opposite of what it promised, and immune to correction because its failures fund it.

The snakes multiply. The ledger says otherwise. Somebody is collecting the coin. — Joe Wolverton II, J.D.

Clarence Thomas on Judicial Precedent

In a recent interview, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas explained his philosophy on stare decisis, or judicial precedent, demonstrating his commitment — at least compared to his fellow justices — to the original meaning of the U.S. Constitution.

In a two-part interview on Verdict with Ted Cruz that aired on August 24 and 26, Thomas compared judicial precedent to a farmer’s plowing. He asked rhetorically, “What if that first row is crooked? What, do you keep going, pretending that it’s straight? Or do you go back and make it straight?… Why would you follow [a precedent] that’s absurd?”

Thomas, who became the second-longest-serving justice on the Supreme Court on May 7, is the most constitutionalist member of the Court since at least the Great Depression, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt replaced its conservative-leaning majority with a left-wing majority that supported expanding federal power.

This is not the first time Thomas has questioned judicial precedent. In multiple Supreme Court opinions, he has either supported overruling specific precedents or challenged the Court’s current doctrine of stare decisis.

For example, in a concurring opinion in Gamble v. United States (2019), Thomas wrote:

In my view, the Court’s typical formulation of the stare decisis standard does not comport with our judicial duty under Article III because it elevates demonstrably erroneous decisions — meaning decisions outside the realm of permissible interpretation — over the text of the Constitution and other duly enacted federal law…. By applying demonstrably erroneous precedent instead of the relevant law’s text — as the Court is particularly prone to do when expanding federal power or crafting new individual rights — the Court exercises “force” and “will,” two attributes the People did not give it….

In my view, if the Court encounters a decision that is demonstrably erroneous — i.e., one that is not a permissible interpretation of the text — the Court should correct the error…. A demonstrably incorrect judicial decision … is tantamount to making law, and adhering to it both disregards the supremacy of the Constitution and perpetuates a usurpation of the legislative power.

Sadly, Thomas’ view on precedent — along with his originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution — is not common among federal judges and the broader legal profession. This helps explain why our Republic and its leaders have departed from constitutional adherence — or even an accurate understanding of its basic founding principles.

The United States has strayed so far from the Constitution that we now have unconstitutional judicial precedents layered on top of earlier unconstitutional judicial precedents. Rather than following this complex regime of precedents, we must return to simply following the Constitution as written. This is not merely a task for elected officials and judges to pursue — “we the people” must get involved by educating our fellow citizens about America’s founding principles and putting pressure on our elected officials to uphold those principles. The John Birch Society leads in the effort to mobilize Americans to do both in a concerted manner. — Peter Rykowski

EPA’s Double Standard on Data-center Transparency

For decades, ordinary Americans have been told that even trace emissions from everyday consumer products carry real environmental stakes. Aerosol deodorants and spray paints are regulated under Clean Air Act rules limiting volatile organic compounds (VOCs) — the theory being that volatile organic compounds react with nitrogen oxide in sunlight to form ground-level ozone, or smog. California’s Air Resources Board built an entire regulatory apparatus around antiperspirants and deodorants specifically, and EPA has run parallel national VOC rules since the 1970s, at one point estimating a national consumer-product rule would cut VOC emissions by 90,000 tons a year. The public message has been consistent: If individuals use aerosol underarm deodorant, it will lead to impending planetary collapse.

Compare that to how Washington is treating a genuinely massive new source of emissions: data centers.

In July, the EPA proposed eliminating the federal 30-day public-notice and comment requirement for “minor source” Clean Air Act permits — the exact permit category covering the backup diesel generators and gas turbines that data centers rely on for power. That federal floor for public participation has been in place for more than 50 years. Under the proposal, states and local agencies would simply decide for themselves whether communities get to see a permit application or weigh in before its approval.

This is happening now, at scale. Georgia alone approved 20 minor-source permits tied to data-center generators between January 2025 and August 2026, compared with just 17 in the entire decade before that. According to Phoenix radio station KJZZ, Sandy Bahr of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter indicated that the proposal “clearly favors the data center industry.” A coalition led by the Center for Biological Diversity has formally urged the EPA to preserve the existing transparency requirements, noting the rule change would affect not just data centers but asphalt plants, landfills, and incinerators as well. However, data centers are the driving force behind the current permit surge.

The EPA’s stated justification is administrative efficiency, letting states decide what’s “necessary.” But notice the asymmetry. When it comes to a can of deodorant spray in a suburban bathroom, the federal government has spent 50 years insisting that emissions, however trace, deserve strict national standards. When it comes to diesel generators powering the server farms behind the AI boom — a politically favored, trillion-dollar priority — the instinct is to strip away the very mechanism (public notice and comment) that lets ordinary citizens find out emissions are happening at all, let alone object to them.

The public comment period on the EPA’s proposal closed August 21, and the rule is not yet final. But the pattern is the lesson: Transparency and precaution apply rigorously to individual citizens and their household products, but evaporate the moment they might slow down an industry Washington has decided to fast-track. — Rebecca Terrell

The Proclamation That Freed No One

Every schoolchild is taught the same sentence, and taught it in the same reverent tone. Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and four million men, women, and children walked out of bondage. It is tidy. It is memorable. It is not true.

The refutation requires no archive. It requires only that a man read the document he claims to admire. The Proclamation reached the slaves held in those states and parts of states then in rebellion against the United States. That is the whole of its reach. It operated precisely where federal authority did not run, and it fell silent precisely where federal authority did.

The exemptions are the argument. Tennessee, occupied and pacified, was excluded by name. So were 13 parishes of Louisiana, New Orleans among them. So were the 48 counties soon to be christened West Virginia, along with Norfolk, Portsmouth, and the other Virginia counties held by federal troops. Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri were not mentioned at all. In those four states, roughly three-quarters of a million human beings remained chattel property, under the Union flag, within carriage distance of the Capitol dome, on the morning of January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. Lincoln’s Secretary of State William H. Seward is said to have caught the absurdity immediately: The government was showing its sympathy for the slave by emancipating him where it had no power and holding him fast where it had every power.

Lincoln had said as much himself five months earlier, in public, over his own signature. Writing to newspaper publisher Horace Greeley in August 1862, he set out his purpose without ornament:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.

Men are entitled to be believed when they testify against their own legend.

What, then, was the paper for? It was a war measure, and the text says so. It rested on the war powers of a commander in chief against a rebellious enemy, justified by military necessity, and Lincoln understood better than his admirers do that a liberty granted by necessity expires when the necessity does. That is why he spent the last year of his life driving the 13th Amendment through a reluctant House. It was the amendment, ratified in December 1865, that abolished slavery in America. The Constitution freed the slaves. The proclamation announced an intention and waited on the army to make it true.

Consider the moment of its announcement. The Northern armies had bled through 1862 with little to show but casualty lists. Enlistments were falling. War weariness was hardening into opposition. Britain and France were weighing recognition of the Confederacy, and cotton was a persuasive diplomat. A war for union is an accounting question. A war for liberation is a crusade, and crusades recruit. The proclamation handed a stalled war a banner, gave hesitating Europeans a moral reason to stay home, and opened the ranks to nearly 200,000 black soldiers who would fight, at unequal pay, for a republic that had not yet decided they were citizens. Whatever else it was, it was superb statecraft.

And here is the lesson no fifth-grade pageant will teach. The proclamation is venerated less for what it accomplished than for the manner of its accomplishment: one man, one pen, one morning, and the moral order rearranged before breakfast. Emperor Augustus left the Roman Senate its chamber, its robes, and its ceremonies, and took everything of substance out the back door. We have kept Article V and learned to route around it. The applause we give a decree is never confined to the decree we happen to like.

A pen that can strike chains can forge them. That is the whole of it, and we have not learned it yet. — Joe Wolverton II, J.D.

Data: ICE Arrests Surged in July

Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rose in July, reaching the highest level so far during Donald Trump’s second presidency.

According to ICE data provided to the Deportation Data Project, ICE arrests surpassed 49,000 in July, a 15-percent increase from about 43,000 arrests in June and a 70-percent increase from about 29,000 arrests in February. When Trump assumed office in January 2025, ICE maintained fewer than 10,000 arrests monthly. Although arrests fell noticeably at the beginning of 2026, that decline appears to have been temporary, and the agency has since ramped up arrests.

This increase has been attributed in part to more ICE agents — 29,000 in June versus only 21,000 in January 2025 — as well as the Trump administration’s expansion of the 287(g) program that deputizes participating local law-enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration laws. Demonstrating the latter reason, nearly 20,000 arrests in July occurred just in Florida and Texas, two states that have participated heavily in the 287(g) program.

Mainstream-media outlets misleadingly claimed that a significant portion of the illegal aliens arrested were “noncriminal,” overlooking the fact that illegal migration is a federal crime. In fact, of those arrested since January 2025, a majority had committed crimes in addition to entering the United States illegally.

This data comes amid new Trump administration actions to rein in mass legal immigration, including revoking thousands of business and tourism visas and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services restarting neighborhood investigations for applicants for U.S. citizenship.

Additionally, the administration appears to be stepping up deportations. For example, The New York Times reported that at least 329 deportation flights, a record number, occurred in July. Additionally, officials plan to expand these flights to Haiti, and have already deported an increasing number of Mexican citizens to third countries.

Although these actions are certainly positive, they are merely first steps toward ending mass migration into the United States. And unless Congress enacts watertight immigration laws and rescinds its unconstitutional delegation of power to the executive branch, Trump’s actions will endure only until the next Democratic administration.

Additionally, state governments must reclaim their sovereign authority over immigration, and should avoid initiatives that subordinate local law enforcement to federal agencies. The federal government has no authority under the U.S. Constitution to engage in interior law enforcement. Instead of subserviently obeying the federal government, the states should reassert the authority they lawfully have. Thus, patriotic Americans must continue pressing for constitutional, pro-American immigration policies. — Peter Rykowski

Corporations Loaning Out Money Like Banks Is Causing a New Wild West of Finance

In the 1950s and ’60s, a strange thing happened to the U.S. dollar: It left home. The Marshall Plan saw billions of dollars leave the United States to rebuild Europe. Those dollars deposited in banks outside America — mostly in London — became known as “Eurodollars,” and because they sat beyond the reach of the Federal Reserve and U.S. banking regulators, they operated by their own rules.

While U.S. banks had transparency strictures imposed on them, the financial institutions operating in the Eurodollar system did not. It was, in practice, the wild west of finance: enormous sums moving with minimal oversight, in a market perfectly suited to laundering, sanctions evasion, and quiet financing of whatever needed financing.

HSBC, a major player in the Eurodollar market, provides an illuminating case study. The bank paid a then-record $1.92 billion settlement in 2012 after admitting it failed to stop at least $881 million in Sinaloa and Norte del Valle cartel drug proceeds from moving through its U.S. arm, on top of processing transactions for sanctioned regimes in Iran, Libya, Sudan, and Cuba. Leaked records later showed the bank kept moving suspect money for years afterward, even while under a court-monitored probation.

The Eurodollar market thrived precisely because it sat outside a regulatory perimeter built for domestic banks. Today, a similar dynamic is reassembling itself — not offshore, but inside the “shadow banking” system of private credit.

Private credit (i.e., lending by non-bank institutions rather than traditional deposit-taking banks) has exploded from roughly $158 billion in 2010 to an estimated $2 trillion to $3.5 trillion globally today. The Financial Stability Board has formally warned that the sector’s “complexity, leverage, and interconnectedness could amplify stress in adverse scenarios,” posing risks well beyond the private credit funds themselves. A recent Forbes analysis called the resulting structure — operating companies being leveraged, private credit funds financing them with more leverage, banks financing the funds, and collateralized loan obligations (loans made to companies with low credit ratings) stacked on top — an architecture that “closely resembles the pre-2008 shadow banking system: less transparent, less regulated, highly interconnected.”

Default rates in the sector have already climbed past six percent by some measures, even as the Fed chair has publicly downplayed contagion risk for now.

What makes this moment different from 2008, or from the original Eurodollar era, is who’s doing the lending. Corporations themselves, including Apple, increasingly function as de facto financial institutions, extending credit and managing enormous cash positions with the reach of sovereign-scale financial actors but none of the transparency obligations of a bank or a state. Business consultant Marjorie Kelly noted in The Divine Right of Capital that by 2001, 51 of the world’s 100 largest economic entities were corporations rather than nation-states — enterprises with revenues rivaling GDPs while still legally treated as “private” property, much as monarchs once treated empires as personal possessions. That imbalance has only grown more pronounced since then, with 74 of the top 100 economic entities being corporations in 2026.

Whenever capital finds a channel that sits outside the regulatory architecture built for the last crisis, it moves there, and oversight lags years behind. It took decades and multiple laundering scandals for anyone to seriously reckon with the Eurodollar market. Private credit and corporate shadow lending are running the same experiment again, at greater scale, with essentially the same questions hanging over it: How much is happening that nobody can see, and how much will it cost to find out?

Keep in mind that the federal government has no constitutional authority to regulate commercial banking. But prior to creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the 1930s, states governed securities-trading with “blue sky laws.” These protected depositors from fraud and detected whether banks were insolvent. The guard rails were erected to encourage average citizens to feel safe depositing their money in banks. The shadow-banking system removes the guard rails, and we therefore have no way of measuring the health of the opaque institutions controlling our financial situation. — Rebecca Terrell