Zerohedge

This weekend saw ongoing protests in the streets of Serbia’s capital Belgrade explode, resulting in clashes with police which included tear gas, batons, and riot control measures deployed against angry crowds which at times hurled flares and bottles.

The demonstrators, which various media reports have estimated reached at least 140,000 people in the city center, are demanding early elections and an end to President Aleksandar Vučić’s 12-year rule. His second term ends in 2027, at which point parliamentary elections are also scheduled.

Vucic’s opponents accuse him and his allies of deep corruption which includes ties to organize crime, resulting in violence against rivals – and in the process greater government control of the media.

The Serbian leader, who maintains warm ties with Russia, says “They wanted to topple Serbia, and they have failed” – according to recent words on his Instagram page.

The growing protests have resulted in the Kremlin weighing in, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying Monday that Western countries must not back a “color revolution” in the Balkan state.

“We hope Western countries, which often exploit domestic affairs in other states to advance their interests, will refrain from color revolutions this time,” Lavrov said, as cited in TASS.

“We are monitoring the situation. We support calming the unrest, as Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić said, in line with the constitution and laws of this friendly state,” he added.

At the same time, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, “We cannot rule out the possibility that well-known tactics employed for carrying out color revolutions are now being used in Serbia.”

Serbia, notably, is heavily dependent on Russian gas and has long been an Orthodox Christian-majority Slavic ally of Moscow, particularly going back to the 1999 US-NATO bombing of Belgrade.

While the protests have been raging for months, they are clearly getting bigger, as over the weekend local media says 48 police officers were injured

BREAKING: Chaos erupts in the streets of Belgrade (Serbia).

Riot police have fired tear gas as protesters that demand early elections from the pro-EU government. pic.twitter.com/zaYJN3h930

— Global Dissident (@GlobalDiss) June 28, 2025

Many dozens of people were arrested, with at least eight protesters currently facing charges related to plans to block roads and attack government facilities. 

The initial anti-government protests were ignited over six months ago, in the wake the deadly collapse of a train station roof in Novi Sad in November – a tragedy which many attribute to systemic corruption.

Serbia remains another one of those East-West fault line countries in which Europe and NATO would like to see a government which moves away from generally warm relations with Russia’s Putin. By and large the population is still anti-NATO, given their memories of the brutal bombing campaign of 1999 led by US warplanes under Clinton.

Authored by EurasiaNet via OilPrice.com,

• Turkmenistan has recently experienced a significant increase in diplomatic attention from both the United States and Russia, suggesting an intensifying geopolitical struggle for influence in the Central Asian nation.

• Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov visited Ashgabat to strengthen economic, cultural, and political ties, while US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau held separate phone conversations with the Turkmen Foreign Minister to discuss cooperation and expanding economic ties.

• Moscow appears concerned by Washington’s growing engagement with Turkmenistan, with Russian media even speculating that a new airport in Jebel could serve American military interests.

Turkmenistan has attracted lots of diplomatic attention this week from both the United States and Russia. The flurry of activity suggests geopolitical jostling is intensifying over the Central Asian state, apparently catalyzed by the recent Iranian-Israeli conflict. 

Turkmen Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov capped a hectic week with a June 26 phone call with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, the Trend news agency reported, adding that the topic of Iran’s clash with Israel came up during the discussion.

The two had also met in person in Ashgabat three days prior.

On June 25, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov concluded a two-day visit to the Turkmen capital Ashgabat. Bilateral economic ties topped the Russian agenda, but it also appeared that the Kremlin is keen to retain its cultural and political influence in the country.

In a speech in Ashgabat, for example, Lavrov announced plans to open a Russian-TurkmenUniversity.

“We pay great attention to youth exchanges. We propose to expand productive interaction,” Lavrov said, according to a transcript released by the Russian Foreign Ministry. He added that Russia intends “to develop ties between young international relations specialists of the two countries with the assistance of the Council of Young Diplomats of our Foreign Ministry.”

Lavrov offered a contradictory view of the United States in his speech, condemning the Trump administration’s bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities while later commending it for demonstrating “realism and common sense,” as opposed to the previous Biden administration’s “conceptual vision of world development that was completely absorbed by its neoliberal hegemonic plans.”

The day of Lavrov’s arrival in Ashgabat, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio held a telephone conversation with Meredov, a noteworthy development considering only about 48 hours before that Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau had a chat with the Turkmen foreign minister. 

Ostensibly, Rubio thanked the Turkmen government for allowing US citizens to leave Iran via Turkmenistan during the Iranian-Israeli conflict. But a State Department summary of the conversation also noted that the United States “looks forward to further partnership with Turkmenistan, including expanding economic and commercial ties.”

Turkmenistan over the past year has taken tentative steps to open up trade connections with the West, underscored by the launch in March of a first-ever swap deal involving Turkey and Iran facilitating the export natural gas to the European Union.

It seems clear that officials in Moscow are unnerved that Washington seems to be making inroads with the energy-rich country sitting on Iran’s northern border. An analysis article published June 23 by Nezavisimaya Gazeta noted that an airport with a long runway opened in May in the remote Turkmen town of Jebel not far from the Caspian Sea, hinting that the facility may prove useful to the American military. 

“The location of the airport, built on the site of a former military airfield of the USSR, with a runway of 3,200 meters and full navigational infrastructure, is quite suitable … as a staging base or for emergency landings of military aircraft during operations against a nearby country,” the commentary stated.

The Wall Street Journal on Sunday covered the ongoing advance of Russian forces beyond and west of Donetsk, describing that troops are now within 12 miles of the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy.

“Having almost entirely ejected Ukrainian forces from the Russian Kursk region earlier this year, Russian forces have now poured over the border in the opposite direction toward Sumy,” the report describes. “With 50,000 troops in the area, they outnumber the Ukrainians roughly 3-to-1, according to soldiers fighting there.”

It should come as no surprise to longtime observers of the war that Moscow taking a slow victory by attrition approach and exhausting the abilities of the other side.

A Ukrainian top military commander has said of the Russians that “Their main strategy is to “wear us down with their numbers.” This also goes for Russia’s superior artillery supply, which earlier in the war was said to outpace Ukraine’s quantity of shells by ten to one.

The WSJ says Ukraine has deployed the “Timur” Special Forces Unit to positions near Sumy in a desperate effort to slow the Russian advance.

One Ukrainian unit commander conceded in a statement to the publication that “numbers are a big problem for us, though not enough to overrun us.” It remains that “The enemy is losing 300 to 400 people per day across the region,” he said. “But they can deal with that level of casualties…They keep bringing in reserves.”

Ukrainian officials believe in Sumy oblast Russia is mainly reliant on poorly trained, large groups of “meat assaults” which seek to simply overwhelm the Ukrainian side.

However, there have been mixed and contradictory reports from the front lines. Ukrainian commanders at the end of last week claimed to have halted Russia’s advance into Sumy.

The Associated Press has pointed out that the Russian incursion into Sumy was made possible after Kursk was regained:

In March, Ukrainian forces withdrew from much of Russia’s neighboring Kursk region, parts of which they had controlled after a surprise cross-border attack in August.

That retreat enabled Russia to launch a counteroffensive that advanced between 2-12 kilometers (1-7 miles) into Ukrainian territory, according to different estimates.

And the fresh WSJ reporting links the situation poor defenses outside of Sumy with risking too much on Zelensky’s Kurk invasion gambit:

During the half-year that Ukraine held territory in Russia’s Kursk region, soldiers who fought there said they assumed the military would be preparing strong defensive positions on the Ukrainian side of the border. Instead, after a chaotic and costly retreat from Kursk, they found outdated trenches, with no overhead cover from drones. The soldiers are now digging their own positions under drone fire in some cases.

Starting in late May, Russian forces took control of the border villages of Novenke, Zhuravka, Veselivka, and Basivka, Hryhorov just inside Sumy Oblast as part of work on Putin’s declared buffer zone plan.

Fresh footage over Sumy via Russian state media:

💥RUSSIAN STRIKES DESTROY UKRAINIAN MILITARY BASE
“Geran” drones hit hard in Sumy region—Ukrainian military positions and drone storage wiped out near the town of Konotop. pic.twitter.com/JU6TA3q8aj

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) June 30, 2025

As for the city of Sumy, it lies just 18 miles from the Russian border and has suffered from intermittent aerial attacks and shelling since the war’s start. The Russian troop surge greatly expands what both sides consider to be the front lines of fighting.

Via Middle East Eye

The son of Iran’s ousted shah is giving an address to British MPs in the UK parliament on Monday, numerous sources within parliament and the Labor Party have told Middle East Eye. 

According to an invitation to the event seen by MEE, Pahlavi is set to brief MPs and peers on “the ongoing situation in Iran and his plan for the collapse of the current regime and for a stable transition to a secular democracy”.

The event was set for 5pm in a committee room in parliament and is co-hosted by Labour MP Luke Akehurst and Conservative MP Aphra Brandreth.

Akehurst told MEE: “It is for the Iranian people to decide what type of government they want, but clearly MPs are going to be interested in hearing what different opposition voices have got to say about the future of such an important country.” MEE also contacted Brandreth for comment.

Referred to among his supporters as a “king in exile”, Reza Pahlavi, 64, is the eldest son of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the late shah of Iran, who was toppled during the 1977-1979 popular uprising that led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic as we now know it. 

Ali Milani, chair of the Labor Muslim Network, told MEE that the planned event in the UK parliament is a “slap in the face of every Iranian fighting for freedom and justice”.

Milani said that Pahlavi “has spent an entire career in exile refusing to condemn his father’s oppressive regime.”

He added: “Countless Iranians were disappeared, tortured and murdered at the hands of his father’s secret police, which he has never properly acknowledged. “Leadership for the people of Iran must come from Iranians themselves on the ground. They deserve real freedom and prosperity.”

As a staunch defender of a US-backed monarchy that he hopes to bring back to Iran, Pahlavi has made several visits to Israel, taken photographs with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and cast himself as the only viable leader of a modern Iran if the Islamic Republic collapses.

On June 16, during the recent hostilities between Israel and Iran, Pahlavi said that “the root cause of the problem has been the regime and its nature, and the only solution, ultimately, that will benefit both the Iranian people as well as the free world is for this regime to no longer be there”.

Responding to Pahlavi’s comments, Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Asif made headlines by calling the shah’s son a “bloody parasitical imperial whore”.

“If Iranian people are energized and motivated according to you,” Asif said in a post on social media platform X, “show some balls and go back and lead them and remove the regime.”

‘Important message from Reza Pahlavi’

Labor MP Akehurst, who was first elected last July, described a June 14 video address by Pahlavi calling for regime change as an “important message from Reza Pahlavi about backing the Iranian people”.

In 2021, Akehurst was asked if he regarded the UN as antisemitic because the Security Council, of which Britain is a member, ruled that “Israel’s establishment of settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, had no legal validity”. Akehurst answered: “Yes.”

In November 2023, he said that the “major West Bank settlement blocks” should become part of Israel as part of a land exchange with Palestine, adding that he wants the Golan Heights “to remain part of Israel”. 

The establishment and expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, according to a recent UN report, amount to a war crime. Before becoming an MP, Akehurst was also once photographed wearing a T-shirt describing himself as a “Zionist shitlord“.

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

There’ll likely be a much greater potential for future conflict, including between Great Powers by proxy…

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov shared some insight into his country’s thinking the future of strategic arms control in an interview with TASS in early June. He began by clarifying that Ukraine’s strategic drone strikes in early June didn’t destroy any planes, it only damaged them, and they’ll all be restored. He then revealed that the Americans were asked “why do you allow yourself to provide the criminals with the relevant data, without which nothing like this could have happened”?

Rybakov didn’t share the answer that they gave his side, but he soon thereafter claimed that “Brussels ‘strategists’ are not giving up their attempts to convince US President Donald Trump to return to the policy pursued by his predecessor. And that policy implied unconditional support for Ukraine and further escalation.” This suggests Russian suspicion that the Trump Administration might be partially influenced by their pressure campaign, and that could account for why it gave Ukraine the data for those attacks.

He was very careful not to accuse Trump himself of any foul play, instead reaffirming that his position towards the Ukrainian Conflict “has become a reason for cautious optimism”, so Russia might have concluded or been convinced by the US that Biden-era officials are to blame for that provocation. In any case, without a normalization of their relations, which requires ending NATO expansion and resolving the aforesaid conflict in a way that resolves its root issues, strategic arms control talks can’t be resumed.

Additionally, Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense initiative (previously known as the Iron Dome just like Israel’s) greatly complicates any such talks even in the unlikely event that they’re resumed, which is due to it militarizing space and turning it into an arena of armed confrontation in Ryabkov’s words. The joint Sino-Russo “Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space” (PAROS) draft treaty could help manage these risks, but the US isn’t interested in discussing it, which could make a new space race inevitable.

Ryabkov elaborated that the Trump Administration denies the interrelationship between strategic offensive and strategic defense weapons while also refusing to return to the New START’s fundamental concept of equal and indivisible security. Accordingly, “There are no grounds for a full-scale resumption of the New START Treaty in the current circumstances. And given that the treaty ends its life cycle in about 8 months, talking about the feasibility of such a scenario is increasingly losing its meaning.”

He declined to speculate on what might replace it or what the world would look like without strategic arms control between its top two nuclear powers, but the overall mood of his interview is morose, with him lamenting the future that might soon unfold upon the New START’s expiry next February. As an old-school diplomat who’s invested considerable time in strategic arms negotiations with the US since entering into his position almost 17 years ago, it clearly pains him to see the end of this era.

Looking forward, Russia will ensure its national security interests, but the rapid evolution of military technologies such as first-person view drones, increasingly audacious attacks like Kiev’s recent ones, and Trump’s Golden Dome is transforming this sphere.

That’s not to say that strategic arms control is useless, but just that even the best agreements are no longer as relevant as before for maintaining international stability, which raises the potential for future conflict, including between Great Powers by proxy.

Authored by Josh Stylman via The Brownstone Institute,

Everyone’s Afraid to Speak

Someone our family has known forever recently told my sister that they’ve been reading my Substack and that if they wrote the things I write, people would call them crazy. I got a kick out of that—not because it’s untrue, but because it reveals something darker about where we’ve ended up as a society. Most people are terrified of being themselves in public.

My sister’s response made me laugh: “People do call him crazy. He simply doesn’t care.” The funniest part is that I don’t even write the craziest stuff I research—just the stuff I can back up with sources and/or my own personal observations. I always try to stay rooted in logic, reason, and facts, though—I’m clear when I’m speculating and when I’m not.

This same guy has sent me dozens of private messages over the last 4 or 5 years challenging me on stuff I share online. I’ll respond with source material or common sense, and then—crickets. He disappears. If I say something he doesn’t want to hear, he vanishes like a child covering his ears. Over the last few years, I’ve been proven right about most of what we’ve argued about, and he’s been wrong. But it doesn’t matter—he’s got the memory of a gnat and the pattern never changes.

But he’d never make that challenge publicly, never risk being seen engaging with my arguments where others might witness the conversation. This kind of private curiosity paired with public silence is everywhere—people will engage with dangerous ideas in private but never risk being associated with them publicly. It’s part of that reflexive “That can’t be true” mindset that shuts down inquiry before it can even begin.

But he’s not alone. We’ve created a culture where wrongthink is policed so aggressively that even successful, powerful people whisper their doubts like they’re confessing crimes.

I was on a hike last year with a very prominent tech VC. He was telling me about his son’s football team—how their practices kept getting disrupted because their usual field on Randall’s Island was now being used to house migrants. He leaned in, almost whispering: “You know, I’m a liberal, but maybe the people complaining about immigration have a point.” Here’s a guy who invests mountains of money into companies that shape the world we live in, and he’s afraid to voice a mild concern about policy in broad daylight. Afraid of his own thoughts.

After I spoke out against vaccine mandates, a coworker told me he totally agreed with my position—but he was angry that I’d said it. When the company didn’t want to take a stand, I told them I would speak as an individual—on my own time, as a private citizen. He was pissed anyway. In fact, he was scolding me about the repercussions to the company. What’s maddening is that this same person had enthusiastically supported the business taking public stands on other, more politically fashionable causes over the years. Apparently, using your corporate voice was noble when it was fashionable. Speaking as a private citizen became dangerous when it wasn’t.

Another person told me that they agreed with me but wished they were “more successful like me” so they could afford to speak out. They had “too much to lose.” The preposterousness of this is staggering. Everyone who spoke out during Covid sacrificed—financially, reputationally, socially. I sacrificed plenty myself.

But I’m no victim. Far from it. Since I was a young man, I’ve never measured achievement by finance or status—my benchmark for being a so-called successful person was owning my own time. Ironically, getting myself canceled was actually a springboard to that. For the first time in my life, I felt I’d achieved time ownership. Whatever I’ve achieved came from being raised by loving parents, working hard, and having the spine to follow convictions rationally. Those attributes, coupled with some great fortune, are the reason for whatever success I’ve had—they’re not the reason I can speak now. Maybe this person should do some inward searching about why they’re not more established. Maybe it’s not about status at all. Maybe it’s about integrity.

This is the adult world we’ve built—one where courage is so rare that people mistake it for privilege, where speaking your mind is seen as a luxury only the privileged can afford, rather than a fundamental requirement for actually becoming established.

And this is the world we’re handing to our children.

We Built the Surveillance State for Them

I remember twenty years ago, my best friend’s wife (who’s also a dear friend) was about to hire someone when she decided to check the candidate’s Facebook first. The woman had posted: “Meeting the whores at [company name]”—referring to my friend and her coworkers. My friend immediately withdrew the offer. I remember thinking this was absolutely terrible judgment on the candidate’s part; however, it was dangerous territory we were entering: the notion of living completely in public, where every casual comment becomes permanent evidence.

Now that danger has metastasized into something unrecognizable. We’ve created a world where every stupid thing a fifteen-year-old says gets archived forever. Not just on their own phones, but screenshot and saved by peers who don’t understand they’re building permanent files on each other—even on platforms like Snapchat that promise everything disappears. We’ve eliminated the possibility of a private adolescence—and adolescence is supposed to be private, messy, experimental. It’s the laboratory where you figure out who you are by trying on terrible ideas and throwing them away.

But laboratories require the freedom to fail safely. What we’ve built instead is a system where every failed experiment becomes evidence in some future trial.

Think about the dumbest thing you believed at sixteen. The most embarrassing thing you said at thirteen. Now imagine that moment preserved in high definition, timestamped, and searchable. Imagine it surfacing when you’re 35 and running for school board, or just trying to move past who you used to be.

If there was a record of everything I did when I was sixteen, I would have been unemployable. Come to think of it, I’m way older than that now and I’m unemployable anyway—but the truth still stands. My generation might have been the last to fully enjoy an analog existence as children. We got to be stupid privately, to experiment with ideas without permanent consequences, to grow up without every mistake being archived for future use against us.

I remember teachers threatening us with our “permanent record.” We laughed—some mysterious file that would follow us forever? Turns out they were just early. Now we’ve built those records and handed the recording devices to children. Companies like Palantir have turned this surveillance into a sophisticated business model.

We’re asking children to have adult judgment about consequences they can’t possibly understand. A thirteen-year-old posting something stupid isn’t thinking about college applications or future careers. They’re thinking about right now, today, this moment—which is exactly how thirteen-year-olds are supposed to think. But we’ve built systems that treat childhood immaturity as a prosecutable offense.

The psychological toll is staggering. Imagine being fourteen and knowing that anything you say might be used against you by people you haven’t met yet, for reasons you can’t anticipate, at some unknown point in the future. That’s not adolescence—that’s a police state built out of smartphones and social media.

The result is a generation that’s either paralyzed by self-consciousness or completely reckless because they figure they’re already screwed. Some retreat into careful blandness, crafting personas so sanitized they might as well be corporate spokespeople for their own lives. Others go scorched earth—if everything’s recorded anyway, why hold back? As my friend Mark likes to say, there’s Andrew Tate and then there’s a bunch of incels—meaning the young men either become performatively brash and ridiculous, or they retreat entirely. The young women seem to either drift toward fearful conformity or embrace monetized exposure on platforms like OnlyFans. We’ve managed to channel an entire generation’s rebellion into the very systems designed to exploit them.

The Covid Conformity Test

This is how totalitarian thinking takes root—not through jackbooted thugs, but through a million small acts of self-censorship. When a venture capitalist whispers his concerns about immigration policy like he’s confessing to a thought crime. When successful professionals agree with dissenting views privately but would never defend them publicly. When speaking obvious truths becomes an act of courage rather than basic citizenship.

George Orwell understood this perfectly. In 1984, the Party’s greatest achievement wasn’t forcing people to say things they didn’t believe—it was making them afraid to believe things they weren’t supposed to say. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” O’Brien explains to Winston. “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.” But the real genius was making citizens complicit in their own oppression, turning everyone into both prisoner and guard.

History shows us how this works in practice. The Stasi in East Germany didn’t just rely on secret police—they turned ordinary citizens into informants. By some estimates, one in seven East Germans was reporting on their neighbors, friends, even family members. The state didn’t need to watch everyone; they got people to watch each other. But the Stasi had limitations: they could recruit informants, but they couldn’t monitor everyone simultaneously, and they couldn’t instantly broadcast transgressions to entire communities for real-time judgment.

Social media solved both problems. Now we have total surveillance capability—every comment, photo, like, and share automatically recorded and searchable. We have instant mass distribution—one screenshot reaching thousands in minutes. We have volunteer enforcement—people eagerly participating in calling out “wrongthink” because it feels righteous. And we have permanent records—unlike Stasi files locked in archives, digital mistakes follow you forever.

The psychological impact is exponentially worse because Stasi informants at least had to make a conscious choice to report someone. Now the reporting happens automatically—the infrastructure is always listening, always recording, always ready to be weaponized by anyone with a grudge or a cause.

We saw this machinery in full operation during Covid. Remember how quickly “two weeks to flatten the curve” became orthodoxy? How questioning lockdowns, mask mandates, or vaccine efficacy wasn’t just wrong—it was dangerous? How saying “maybe we should consider the trade-offs of closing schools” could get you labeled a grandma-killer? The speed at which dissent became heresy was breathtaking.

History has shown us that governments can be terrible to citizens. The hardest pill to swallow was the horizontal policing. Your neighbors, coworkers, friends, and family members became the enforcement mechanism. People didn’t just comply; they competed—virtue-signaling their way into a collective delusion where asking basic questions about cost-benefit analysis became evidence of moral deficiency. Neighbors called police on neighbors for having too many people over. People photographed “violations” and posted them online for mass judgment.

And the most insidious part? The people doing the policing genuinely believed they were the good guys. They thought they were protecting society from dangerous misinformation, not realizing they had become the misinformation—that they were actively suppressing the kind of open inquiry that’s supposed to be the foundation of both science and democracy.

The Ministry of Truth didn’t need to rewrite history in real time. Facebook and Twitter did it for them, memory-holing inconvenient posts and banning users who dared to share pre-approved scientific studies that happened to reach unapproved conclusions. The Party didn’t need to control the past—they just needed to control what you were allowed to remember about it.

This wasn’t an accident or an overreaction. This was a stress test of how quickly a free society could be transformed into something unrecognizable, and we failed spectacularly. Anyone who actually followed the science understood that the only pandemic was one of cowardice. Worse, most people didn’t even notice we were being tested. They thought they were just “following the science”—never mind that the data kept changing to match the politics, or that questioning anything had somehow become heretical.

The beautiful thing about this system is that it’s self-sustaining. Once you’ve participated in the mob mentality, once you’ve policed your neighbors and canceled your friends and stayed silent when you should have spoken up, you become invested in maintaining the fiction that you were right all along. Admitting you were wrong isn’t just embarrassing—it’s an admission that you participated in something monstrous. So instead, you double down. You disappear when confronted with inconvenient facts.

Raising Prisoners

And this brings us back to the children. They’re watching all of this. But more than that—they’re growing up inside this surveillance infrastructure from birth. The Stasi’s victims at least had some years of normal psychological development before the surveillance state kicked in. These kids never get that. They’re born into a world where every thought might be public, every mistake permanent, every unpopular opinion potentially life-destroying.

The psychological impact is devastating. Research shows that children who grow up under constant surveillance—even well-meaning parental surveillance—show higher rates of anxiety, depression, and what psychologists call “learned helplessness.” They never develop internal locus of control because they never get to make real choices with real consequences. But this goes far deeper than helicopter parenting.

The ability to hold unpopular opinions, to think through problems independently, to risk being wrong—these aren’t just nice-to-haves. They’re core to psychological maturity. When you eliminate those possibilities, you don’t just get more compliant people; you get people who literally can’t think for themselves anymore. They outsource their judgment to the crowd because they never developed their own.

We’re creating a generation of psychological cripples—people who are practiced at reading social cues and adjusting their thoughts accordingly, but who have never learned to form independent judgments. People who mistake consensus for truth and popularity for virtue. People who have been so thoroughly trained to avoid wrong-think that they’ve either lost—or never developed—the capacity for original thought entirely.

But here’s what’s most disturbing: the kids are learning this behavior from us. They’re watching adults who whisper their real thoughts, who agree privately but stay silent publicly, who confuse strategic silence with wisdom. They’re learning that authenticity is dangerous, that having real convictions is a luxury they can’t afford. They’re learning that truth is negotiable, that principles are disposable, and that the most important skill in life is reading the room and adjusting your thoughts accordingly.

The feedback loop is complete: adults model cowardice, children learn that genuine expression is risky, and everyone becomes practiced at self-censorship rather than self-examination. We’ve created a society where the Overton window isn’t just narrow—it’s actively policed by people who are terrified of stepping outside it, even when they privately disagree with its boundaries.

This is the architecture of soft totalitarianism. Just the constant, gnawing fear that saying the wrong thing—or even thinking it too loudly—will result in social death. The beauty of this system is that it makes everyone complicit. Everyone has something to lose, so everyone stays quiet. Everyone remembers what happened to the last person who spoke up, so nobody wants to be next.

The technology doesn’t just enable this tyranny; it makes it psychologically inevitable. When the infrastructure punishes independent thinking before it can fully form, you get psychological arrested development on a mass scale.

It’s already baked into education and employment through DEI and ESG. Wait till it’s baked into the monetary system. Maybe they’re just connecting us to the Borg anyway?

We’re passing this pathology down to our children like a genetic disorder. Except this disorder isn’t inherited—it’s enforced. And unlike genetic disorders, this one serves a purpose: it creates a population that’s easy to control, easy to manipulate, easy to lead around by the nose as long as you control the social rewards and punishments.

The Price of Truth

I don’t share my opinions because I “get away with it”—I don’t get away with anything. I’ve paid socially, professionally, and even financially. But I do it anyway because the alternative is spiritual death. The alternative is becoming someone who messages critics privately but never takes a public stand, someone who’s perpetually annoyed by others’ courage but never exercises their own.

The difference isn’t ability or privilege. It’s willingness. I’m open-minded and open-hearted. I can be convinced of anything—but show me, don’t tell me. I’m willing to be wrong, willing to change my mind when new information comes to light or I gain a different perspective on an idea, willing to defend ideas I believe in even when it’s uncomfortable.

There are a lot of us right now realizing that something isn’t right—that we’ve been lied to about everything. We’re trying to make sense of what we’re seeing, asking uncomfortable questions, connecting dots that don’t want to be connected. When we call that out, the last thing we need is people who haven’t done the work standing in our way, carrying water for the establishment forces that are manipulating them.

Most people could do the same thing if they chose to—they just don’t choose to because they’ve been trained to see conviction as dangerous and conformity as safe.

A 2020 Cato Institute survey found that 62% of Americans say the political climate prevents them from sharing their political beliefs because others might find them offensive. Majorities of Democrats (52%), independents (59%), and Republicans (77%) all agree they have political opinions they are afraid to share.

When adults who lived through Covid saw what happens when groupthink becomes gospel—how quickly independent thought gets labeled dangerous, how thoroughly dissent gets suppressed—many responded not by becoming more committed to free expression, but by becoming more careful about what they express. They learned the wrong lesson.

What we’re creating is a society where authenticity has become a radical act, where courage is so rare it looks like privilege. We’re raising children who learn that being yourself is dangerous, that having real opinions carries unlimited downside risk. They’re not just careful about what they say—they’re careful about what they think.

This doesn’t create better people. It creates more fearful people. People who mistake surveillance for safety, conformity for virtue, and silence for wisdom. People who’ve forgotten that the point of having thoughts is sometimes to share them, that the point of having convictions is sometimes to defend them.

The solution isn’t to abandon technology or retreat into digital monasteries. But we need to create spaces—legal, social, psychological—where both kids and adults can fail safely. Where mistakes don’t become permanent tattoos. Where changing your mind is seen as growth rather than hypocrisy. Where having convictions is valued over having clean records.

Most importantly, we need adults who are willing to model courage instead of strategic silence—who understand that the price of speaking up is usually less than the price of staying quiet. In a world where everyone’s afraid to say what they think, the honest voice doesn’t just stand out—it stands up.

Because right now, we’re not just living in fear—we’re teaching our children that fear is the price of participation in society. And a society built on fear isn’t a society at all. It’s just a more comfortable prison, one where the guards are ourselves and the keys are our own convictions, which we’ve learned to keep safely locked away.

Whether it’s experimental medicine or the masters of war lying again to drag us into what might become World War III—it’s PSYOP season—it’s never been more important that people find their conviction, use their voice, and become a force for good. If you’re still scared to push back against war propaganda, still getting swept up in manufactured outrage cycles, still choosing your principles based on which team is in power—then you may have learned absolutely nothing from the last few years.

These days, friends are starting to confide in me that maybe I was right about the mRNA vaccines not working. I don’t gloat—in fact, I appreciate the openness. But my standard reply is that they’re four years late to the story. They’ll know they’ve caught up when they realize the world is run by a bunch of satanic pedophiles. And yeah, I used to think that sounded crazy too.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) on June 30 said that almost $15 billion was reported in losses in the “largest health care fraud” investigation in U.S. history, with officials charging more than 300 people in connection with the alleged scheme.

In a post on social media platform X, FBI Director Kash Patel wrote that $14.6 billion in losses were incurred, while $245 million was seized, as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino said in a separate post on X that hundreds of people were charged in the case.

$245 million seized, hundreds of defendants and medical professionals charged, and $15 billion in losses prevented in the largest coordinated healthcare fraud takedown in history. Well done to all state and federal partners who pushed this. https://t.co/ZlFPU6CsK3

— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) June 30, 2025

“Public corruption will not be tolerated as the Director and I vigorously pursue bad actors who violated their oaths to all of us,” Bongino said, describing the case as the “largest healthcare fraud investigation” in the country’s history.

The investigation encompassed 50 federal districts and 12 state attorneys general, according to the DOJ. State and federal law enforcement agencies also took part, according to the FBI.

A statement issued by the DOJ said that criminal charges were filed against 324 defendants, including 96 doctors, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, and other health care workers across the United States. Officials said that 29 defendants were charged with partaking in transnational criminal groups who allegedly submitted around $12 billion in fraudulent health-related claims to U.S. health insurance companies.

Further, four defendants were apprehended in Estonia based on cooperation with law enforcement agencies in that country, while seven others were arrested at the U.S.–Mexico border or at American airports, the DOJ said.

That organization, federal prosecutors said, is accused of using individuals sent into the United States from other countries to purchase “dozens of medical supply companies located across the United States” before submitting $10.6 billion in fraudulent health care claims to Medicare for medical devices and equipment.

At the same time, that group allegedly exploited stolen identities from U.S. citizens across all 50 states, using their stolen medical information to submit the false claims, according to the DOJ.

In another action announced by the DOJ, federal officials said they filed charges in Illinois against five people, including the owners of two Pakistan-based marketing companies, in relation to a $703 million Medicare fraud scheme.

The defendants allegedly stole Medicare beneficiaries’ confidential information and sold it to laboratories and other medical companies, which then submitted false Medicare claims, according to the statement.

“The defendants allegedly used artificial intelligence to create fake recordings of Medicare beneficiaries purportedly consenting to receive certain products,” the DOJ’s statement said.

The results of the operation on June 30 come as federal prosecutors and the FBI have increasingly targeted health care fraud and related schemes.

In 2024, officials with the DOJ charged 193 people, including 76 doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals, with participating in health care fraud schemes worth $2.75 billion.

In that case, the defendants were accused of illegally distributing millions of pills of the stimulant Adderall and of conducting fraudulent schemes involving $176 million of drug and alcohol abuse treatment services. One defendant allegedly billed the federal Medicaid program for treatment that was either inadequate or nonexistent, prosecutors said at the time.

And in 2023, the DOJ announced federal criminal charges targeting 78 defendants across 16 states as part of a law enforcement action involving $2.5 billion in alleged health care fraud schemes targeting elderly and disabled people, HIV patients, and pregnant women.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) rolled out the “Second Amendment” tax holiday earlier this year, offering sales tax relief on firearms, ammunition, and related gear. The tax holiday officially begins on September 8. The initiative arrives as the U.S. gun industry has slumped into a downturn after the pandemic-era buying frenzy; in other words, the industry is just normalizing. 

Gov. DeSantis announced earlier today that the tax holiday on firearms and related items will run from September 8 to December 31. He also confirmed the tax break will extend to a wide range of outdoor gear, including fishing equipment, bowhunting supplies, and other recreational items. Calculated savings amount to more than $8 million for gun buyers. 

🚨 BREAKING: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announces 2ND AMENDMENT TAX HOLIDAY for this year.

SEPT 8th to DEC 31st, tax free!

Firearms, ammunition, accoutrement, and more pic.twitter.com/jWQ81OY38T

— USCCA (@USCCA) June 30, 2025

The firearms industry is likely celebrating the upcoming tax holiday, as it’s expected to spur much-needed demand. This comes at a time when the U.S. gun market has languished in recent years. Just weeks ago, Smith & Wesson Brands warned investors to brace for yet another year of disappointing results.

A common proxy for firearm demand is the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). A NICS check is conducted every time someone purchases a gun from a federally licensed dealer. While not all checks represent sales—some are for permits, renewals, or private transfers depending on state laws—NICS data still provides a snapshot of overall gun demand. 

Seasonality data via Bloomberg shows NICS falling back to a 15-year trend line after robust gun demand from the pandemic era. Historically, firearm demand also tends to soften when a Republican is in the White House, reducing urgency among core gun-buying demographics. 

Florida’s current sales tax rate is 6%, which means that Floridians would save around $543 on something like a Barrett M82A1 29″ 50 BMG — enough to buy 140 rounds of 50 cal. 

The perfect reaction to 50cal pic.twitter.com/HSke2ZjLd1

— Firearm Videos (@firearmvideos) June 28, 2025

. . . 
 

Authored by George Citroner via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Ultra-processed foods (UPF) may be literally rewiring your brain to make you overeat, according to research that examined brain scans from nearly 30,000 middle-aged adults and found structural changes in regions that control hunger and food cravings.

“We present evidence that eating UPFs increases several nutrient and metabolic markers of disease and is associated with structural brain changes in areas that regulate eating behavior,” the study authors wrote.

Key Brain Changes Identified

The research, recently published in Nature, found that people who consumed more UPFs showed measurable differences in brain areas involved in feeding behavior, emotion, and motivation.

Higher UPF intake was linked to increased thickness in the bilateral lateral occipital cortex—a brain region crucial for visual object recognition and processing shapes. This finding suggests changes in how the brain processes visual food cues.

“Our findings indicate that a high consumption of ultra-processed foods is associated with structural changes in brain regions regulating eating behaviour, such as the hypothalamus, amygdala and right nucleus accumbens. This may lead to a cycle of overeating,” Arsène Kanyamibwa, the study’s first author and doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, said in a press statement.

The study also uncovered a potential biological mechanism behind these brain changes. Researchers found that increased UPF intake was associated with higher levels of systemic inflammation and risky metabolic markers in the blood, including C-reactive protein (CRP), an indicator of inflammation; triglycerides; and glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c). High levels of CRP, triglycerides, and HbA1c are often considered concerning indicators of potential health issues.

Unsurprising Findings, Expert Says

The findings “don’t surprise me one bit,” said Dr. Joseph Mercola, a board-certified family physician and author of “Your Guide to Cellular Health,” who was not involved in the study.

He pointed to previous research showing that just five days of eating ultra-processed foods can “short-circuit” insulin signaling in the brain. This matters because insulin isn’t only a blood sugar hormone, he noted. “It’s literally the delivery service that shuttles glucose, your cells’ preferred fuel, to where it’s needed most—your brain.”

The brain needs insulin for energy—it uses 20 percent of the body’s energy despite making up just 2 percent of its weight—so when insulin can’t do its job, the brain’s appetite control centers run on fumes, Mercola said.

UPFs are designed to be “hyper-palatable“ with combinations of sugar, fat, and salt that rapidly stimulate dopamine-driven reward pathways, encouraging repeated consumption.

Mercola added that this breakdown wrecks our ability to feel full, curb cravings, and make solid dietary decisions. “On top of that, ultra-processed foods light up dopamine pathways much like addictive drugs, creating powerful ‘eat more’ signals.”

Direct Brain Effects

The researchers noted that UPFs, which contain chemically modified ingredients and additives like emulsifiers, might change the brain through pathways independent of obesity. Emulsifiers may affect the brain by disrupting neurotransmitters, causing neuroinflammation, and altering gut microbiota.

The study controlled for factors including nutrient content, socioeconomic status, physical activity, smoking, and alcohol use.

The finding challenges the idea that obesity is just about eating too many calories, Avery Zenker, a registered dietitian at MyHealthTeam and EverFlex Fitness who holds a master’s degree in nutrition and was not involved in the study, told The Epoch Times. The study highlights how additives and food processing affect the brain in a way that promotes overeating.

“A calorie is a calorie, but the type of food it’s sourced from plays a significant role in how we eat and how much we eat,” Zenker said. “I think it’s also validating for people to hear that, if they feel out of control around ultra-processed foods, there’s nothing wrong with them.”

Ultra-processed foods are defined by the NOVA classification system as industrial formulations containing ingredients not typically used in home cooking, such as high-fructose corn syrup, oils, salt, stabilizers, antioxidants, and various chemical additives.

Growing Body of Evidence

The researchers note that their findings, in addition to previous studies, suggest it’s time for regulatory action.

One of these studies, involving more than 114,000 American adults and published last year in The BMJ, found UPF consumption—specifically processed meats, sugary breakfast foods, and sugar or artificially sweetened beverages—was linked to a 4 percent higher risk of all-cause mortality and an 8 percent higher risk of death from neurodegenerative diseases.

“Given the growing body of evidence, reducing ultra-processed food intake and strengthening regulatory standards in food manufacturing may be crucial steps toward ensuring better public health outcomes,” Kanyamibwa said.

Zenker said the new study is consistent with much of the existing research on ultra-processed foods.

“While past research has consistently linked UPFs to health conditions like obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease,” she said, “This study goes further by exploring direct structural changes in the brain, particularly in regions related to reward, hunger, and self-regulation.”

Zenker noted that UPFs are often high in sugar, sodium, fat, and carbohydrates, and low in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. “We know that this combination tends to be associated with unfavorable health outcomes.”

The researchers acknowledged limitations in their study, noting that while they found associations between UPF consumption and brain changes, they cannot definitively prove causation. The effect sizes were also relatively small.

“Given the observational nature of the study, we cannot exclude the fact that food processing is only part of the equation,” the study authors wrote. Kanyamibwa said that proving causation will require “further longitudinal or experimental evidence.”

It’s widely accepted that quantum computing remains a long-term bet, with meaningful commercialization unlikely before the 2030s—if not later.

Investor enthusiasm plunged sharply in early January after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang remarked that “very useful” quantum computers are still years away. Since then, however, quantum computing stocks (IonQ, Rigetti Computing, D-Wave Quantum, and Quantum Computing) have soared, adding billions of dollars in market capitalization. 

Morgan Stanley’s latest report, “Quantum Computing – How Will It Impact AI?”, offers one of the most comprehensive overviews to date, mapping out the evolving quantum landscape and its growing convergence with the artificial intelligence boom.

A team of analysts led by Shawn Kim told clients that quantum computing is entering a new era, marked by breakthroughs such as Microsoft’s ‘Majorana 1’ and Google’s ‘Willow’ chips, which promise to outperform today’s supercomputers.

They noted that these advances could accelerate AI development by enabling solutions to problems currently beyond the reach of classical computing. Rather than replacing classical systems, quantum computing is expected to serve as a powerful accelerator, enhancing AI’s capabilities, particularly in finance, logistics, pharmaceuticals, and energy.

While practical applications remain in the early stages, cloud-based access from big tech is making quantum tools increasingly accessible. Although widespread commercialization is still years away, early investments in the quantum AI ecosystem have already begun, and growing speculation over the industry’s long-term potential has sent related stocks soaring.

Here’s how the analysts frame the broader outlook for the quantum computing industry to clients: 

• A Quantum leap beyond the Silicon Age. Microsoft’ Majorana 1′ or Google ‘Willow’ quantum chips were launched earlier this year, representing a paradigm shift in the ability to harness the laws of quantum mechanics to perform calculations orders of magnitude faster than today’s supercomputers. This could lead to faster breakthroughs in AI that are currently beyond the reach of classical computing, transforming how we approach complex problems, develop intelligent systems, and make predictions with a level of accuracy and speed that was previously impossible.

• A powerful synergy – augmenting AI capabilities. We view a merging of the speed of quantum computing with the learning power of AI as a partnership rather than a competition with classical computing. Quantum chips are designed to work as quantum accelerators alongside AI systems to unlock entirely new capabilities that can amplify AI’s potential beyond the reach of classical computing. The two technologies have very different strengths and therefore lend themselves to different use cases with AI excelling at creativity, language and video processing, while quantum computing is more suited for tackling complex problems that are beyond the capabilities of classical algorithms.

• There will be no shortage of commercial applications. Quantum computing has become more accessible as big tech companies are now offering services via their cloud services, narrowing the gap between theory and practical implementation with the potential to reshape many industries such as finance, pharmaceuticals, logistics and energy by solving complex AI problems much faster than classical computers. Most real-world uses are relatively small today and still in development, but the future looks promising.

• Preparing for a quantum AI future. The practical applications and integration of quantum computing into AI systems are still in the early stages of development, but much like in the early days of semiconductors, early investments in successful quantum companies and their ecosystems will likely yield substantial returns. An important question remains around the commercial timeline, although many early leaders are computing incumbents and some start-ups.

The analysts outlined the rationale behind publishing this report to clients:

Why we’re writing this report: Following our first deep dive into quantum computing nearly five years ago ( The New Processing Paradigms, 19 July 2020 ), we wanted to take stock of the many moving pieces in the sector after several tech giants released new quantum chips earlier this year. Hyperscalers such as Google (Willow), Microsoft (Majorana1), IBM and Amazon (Ocelot) are all investing in the rapidly evolving quantum race. Some of them are partnering with quantum computer companies and some are doing it in-house. In this report we focus on quantum developments and how they could impact AI in three domains – computing, metrology, and communication – in terms of commercial use cases. As the quantum computing market continues to evolve, staying informed about advances, commercial applications, and regulatory developments will be essential for making sound investment decisions in this emerging sector.

Provided more insight into quantum computing’s impacts on AI:

Quantum computing allows AI to think much faster by introducing non-deterministic and probabilistic elements that allow for more intuitive reasoning vs. current AI that is largely a sophisticated pattern recognition machine. By leveraging quantum superposition, entanglement, and interference, new quantum AI models offer the potential for significant reductions in both computational cost and energy consumption. As quantum computing develops, its integration with AI has the potential to unlock entirely new approaches that are more efficient, enable significantly better accuracy, and hence better performance. AI tools like ChatGPT have already made a profound impact on society, but a critical limitation is the need for computational behemoths using classical large language models (LLMs) that are expensive to train. With fewer parameters required, quantum models could make AI more sustainable, tackling one of the biggest challenges facing the industry today.

Quantum computers have been around for decades, but mostly as experimental models in research institutions and technology companies. Unlike classical computing models, which are binary representations of electrical switches (transistors), quantum computers measure states of subatomic particles using qubits (quantum bits). Quantum computers are still not powerful enough today to do anything commercially viable in AI, due the sensitivity of quantum systems to noise and error. A lot of effort is being made to overcome hurdles, however, industry experts and hyperscale cloud providers predict the timeline for practical commercial applications of quantum computers may only be five years out.

• Quantum computing. Quantum computers store and process quantum data as opposed to binary data. Unlike current AI systems, which rely on GPU (graphics processing unit) or ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) chips, quantum computers harness technologies such as superconducting circuits, trapped ions and neutral atoms in highly isolated environments to protect their fragile processing. The main challenge lies in scaling and improving the hardware to fully exploit the potential of quantum computing, which has a number of important uses in computing fields including optimization, power efficiency, and machine learning. Quantum computers are also known for their potential to carry out ‘Shor’s Algorithm’, which can be used to factorize large numbers to decrypt data transmissions.
• Quantum communication (transfer of quantum ‘signals’). Quantum communication takes advantage of properties unique to the physics of quantum mechanics, opening new paradigms for communication that cannot be realized by classical (non-quantum) communication. Quantum communication could enhance AI’s ability to process and share real-time data across distributed networks, and provide ultra-secure data transmission. Distributed quantum computers and quantum sensors are interconnected with a quantum communication network in the quantum equivalent of the classical internet.
• Quantum metrology and sensing. This uses the physical properties of quantum systems – photons and atoms – to set standards for units of measurement in science and industry, as well as for engineering other high-precision technologies. Enhanced imaging and sensing technologies from quantum sensors, combined with AI, could achieve breakthroughs in areas such as autonomous systems, medical diagnostics and environmental monitoring. Use cases include quantum imaging or quantum radar that compromise stealth technology. It is also the only known way to detect dark matter and energy.

Before readers get too excited about quantum stocks, the analysts note: “Quantum is still very much in its infancy.” 

Perhaps most intriguing, the analysts frame the quantum race as a split between the West and the East. 

Here are the key players to watch in the space:

• IBM – Most advanced ecosystem, aiming for 200+ logical qubits and commercialization by 2029.

• Microsoft – Game-changing topological qubit architecture.

• Google – “Willow” chip achieved major error-correction milestones.

• Amazon – “Ocelot” chip; working on bosonic error correction.

• IonQ, Rigetti, Quantinuum – Specialized quantum startups with wide-ranging partnerships.

Pure Play & Big Tech Stocks 

And now to the part that matters most for investors: the timeline for commercialization.

According to the analysts: 

What’s the timing? The consensus quantum computing timeline suggests meaningful commercial applications emerging around 2029-30, with more advanced utility-scale quantum computing expected in the early to mid-2030s. The timing for quantum computing commercialization varies across different milestones, with several key timeframes emerging from industry experts and companies in the field. There are coordinated efforts from companies and governments to make quantum work and still primarily in the research and development phase. Many experts believe the chance of Q- day happening before 2030 is over 50%. Businesses are taking it seriously, pouring billions into preparation and will likely to begin to derive value well before via cloud offerings that are already available today for basic quantum computations.

• Current state (2025): Quantum computing is still primarily in the research and development phase. Companies like Rigetti are working on scaling their systems, with plans to reach 100+ qubits by the end of 2025 with targeted improvements in error rates.

• Commercial applications (2029-2030): Multiple sources indicate that meaningful commercial applications of quantum computing are expected in approximately 4-5 years from now:

• Cryptographic threats (2030): A cryptanalytically relevant quantum computer capable of breaking common public key schemes such as RSA or ECC is expected by 2030. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has set 2030 as the timeline for implementing quantum-secure algorithms and deprecating currently used cryptographic methods.

The Roadmap

Read the rest of Morgan Stanley’s deep quantum computing dive—available here for pro subs.