Who Verifies Artificial Intelligence? When AI Learns Jew-Hate - Pierre Rehov

 

by Pierre Rehov

After submitting OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama to more than 34,000 queries about Jews, Israel, the Holocaust and antisemitic tropes, a March 2025 study by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of the four leading large language models (LLMs) found measurable anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias in every model tested.

 

• Artificial intelligence (AI) is quietly replacing the institutions through which the West once transmitted knowledge. Students who a generation ago consulted teachers and libraries now consult with often extremely unreliable chatbots.

• After submitting OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama to more than 34,000 queries about Jews, Israel, the Holocaust and antisemitic tropes, a March 2025 study by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of the four leading large language models (LLMs) found measurable anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias in every model tested.

• Whatever humanity has written in sufficient volume, the machine absorbs, including its pathologies. If enough people write that the Earth is flat, AI will tell you that the Earth is flat.

• The contradictions never matter: the accusations are never sustained by evidence in the first place. Repetition keeps them alive, and repetition is precisely what the modern information ecosystem industrializes.

• The enormity and volume of that repetition would have been unimaginable to earlier generations. Iranian state media, Russian influence operations, China's gargantuan, poisonous TikTok, Hamas media outlets, Holocaust-denial platforms and legions of anonymous accounts produce a continuous stream of fabrication surrounding Israel and the Jewish people.

• A debunked falsehood does not vanish; it settles into thousands of web pages and waits there, inside the corpus from which the next generation of AI frontier models will "learn."

• A machine has no concept of propaganda. It recognizes statistical regularities, and a lie repeated across a sufficient share of its training data acquires the weight of a fact. An answer about the Arab-Israeli conflict can therefore appear scrupulously balanced while quietly granting credibility to claims manufactured by a state disinformation service. What emerges carries the appearance of judgment but the substance of arithmetic.

• [A] parallel ADL investigation... identified at least 30 senior editors at Wikipedia who coordinated for a decade to reshape entries on Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, stripping citations to peer-reviewed research on Palestinian terrorism, burying Hamas's designation as a terrorist organization and recasting Zionism as a colonial land grab, while the Arabic-language edition of Wikipedia openly glorifies the perpetrators of October 7. Wikipedia's own arbitration committee has since banned some editors from the entire topic area, a tacit admission of the manipulation.

• The source from which artificial intelligence learns history is resolutely being rewritten by terror-supporting militants in real time: every model trained tomorrow will inherit today's falsifications as settled fact.

• A joint study by the United Nations and UNESCO found that roughly one-sixth of Holocaust-related content on major platforms denies or distorts the facts...

• AI answers arrive coherent, articulate and serenely assured. Users assume they have been verified, when even the most advanced systems still hallucinate, contradict themselves and err on elementary matters of fact. When the subject is a restaurant or a line of code, the cost is trivial. When it is the Holocaust, terrorism or the legitimacy of the Jewish state, the error feeds directly into debates already poisoned by decades of ideological warfare and state-sponsored propaganda.

• A society that accepts fiction about the Jews has already most likely begun accepting fiction about everything.

• The civilization that taught machines to diagnose disease and decode ancient languages now carries the responsibility of ensuring they do not also recycle its oldest lie, its youngest lie, and the trillions of lies in the middle.

(Image source: OpenAI)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is quietly replacing the institutions through which the West once transmitted knowledge. Students who a generation ago consulted teachers and libraries now consult with often extremely unreliable chatbots. Reportedly 54% of American teenagers already use AI apps such as ChatGPT and its peers for schoolwork. Journalists, lawyers and civil employees are following the same path.

This deserves serious attention. After submitting OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama to more than 34,000 queries about Jews, Israel, the Holocaust and antisemitic tropes, a March 2025 study by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of the four leading large language models (LLMs) found measurable anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias in every model tested. One detail stands out for its clinical precision. Asked whether the American government orchestrated the attacks of September 11, all four systems dismissed the alleged conspiracy theory without hesitation, but asked whether "the Jews" did, all but one wavered. Somewhere in their oceans of training data, the machines had learned that this particular lie deserved a hearing.

Anyone who understands how these systems are built will find the result unsurprising. An LLM model investigates nothing and weighs no evidence. It has digested a corpus larger than any one civilization has ever assembled, drawn from scientific literature and reference works, but also from the news media, discussion forums, activist blogs, propaganda outlets and billions of web pages whose accuracy no engineer can vouch for. Filtering exists, and companies invest heavily in it, yet no human team can read hundreds of billions of words. Whatever humanity has written in sufficient volume, the machine absorbs, including its pathologies. If enough people write that the Earth is flat, AI will tell you that the Earth is flat.

Antisemitism is a pathology that has survived every century. It moved from the medieval sermon to the printing press, the pamphlet, newspapers, movies, radio and television, the internet social media -- recycling in each era familiar accusations, including that of hidden Jewish "manipulation." During the Black Death, Jews were accused of poisoning wells; in the twentieth century they somehow controlled both capitalism and communism at the same time; today they ostensibly control governments, the media, the banks, Western foreign policy and even perpetrate massacres against themselves. The contradictions never matter: the accusations are never sustained by evidence in the first place. Repetition keeps them alive, and repetition is precisely what the modern information ecosystem industrializes.

The enormity and volume of that repetition would have been unimaginable to earlier generations. Iranian state media, Russian influence operations, China's gargantuan, poisonous TikTok, Hamas media outlets, Holocaust-denial platforms and legions of anonymous accounts produce a continuous stream of fabrication surrounding Israel and the Jewish people. Researchers at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab have traced how, within hours of the October 7, 2023 massacre, recycled footage, clips lifted from video games and invented claims flooded the platforms faster than anyone could verify or debunk them. Exposure changes little. A debunked falsehood does not vanish; it settles into thousands of web pages and waits there, inside the corpus from which the next generation of AI frontier models will "learn."

Herein lies the trap. A machine has no concept of propaganda. It recognizes statistical regularities, and a lie repeated across a sufficient share of its training data acquires the weight of a fact. An answer about the Arab-Israeli conflict can therefore appear scrupulously balanced while quietly granting credibility to claims manufactured by a state disinformation service. What emerges carries the appearance of judgment but the substance of arithmetic.

The contamination reaches the very source the machines are taught to trust most. The Wikimedia Foundation itself acknowledges that every LLM is trained on Wikipedia, almost always the largest source of data, weighted above ordinary websites despite its massive bias and unreliability (also here, here, here and here). Where Jews and Israel are concerned, a parallel ADL investigation, published the same month, identified at least 30 senior editors at Wikipedia who coordinated for a decade to reshape entries on Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, stripping citations to peer-reviewed research on Palestinian terrorism, burying Hamas's designation as a terrorist organization and recasting Zionism as a colonial land grab, while the Arabic-language edition of Wikipedia openly glorifies the perpetrators of October 7. Wikipedia's own arbitration committee has since banned some editors from the entire topic area, a tacit admission of the manipulation.

The source from which artificial intelligence learns history is resolutely being rewritten by terror-supporting militants in real time: every model trained tomorrow will inherit today's falsifications as settled fact.

Holocaust memory shows what is at stake. A joint study by the United Nations and UNESCO found that roughly one-sixth of Holocaust-related content on major platforms denies or distorts the facts, a share that climbs to nearly half on largely unmoderated Telegram. The Claims Conference's survey of eight countries found that 48% of Americans cannot name a single concentration camp or Jewish ghetto out of the more than 40,000 the Nazis established and that in France, 46% of adults under the age of 30 were not sure they had ever heard of the Holocaust.

These are the very cohorts for whom an AI chatbot is becoming the first, and often the only, source of historical knowledge. A system that hedges where reputable historians have assembled overwhelming proof, or that presents Holocaust denial as one perspective among others, delivers manufactured doubt with the fluency of a train schedule, and in seconds erodes certainties built on decades of testimony and scholarship.

To this technological weakness must be added a psychological one, which researchers call automation bias: the human tendency to trust a computer's conclusion more readily than a colleague's. AI answers arrive coherent, articulate and serenely assured. Users assume they have been verified, when even the most advanced systems still hallucinate, contradict themselves and err on elementary matters of fact. When the subject is a restaurant or a line of code, the cost is trivial. When it is the Holocaust, terrorism or the legitimacy of the Jewish state, the error feeds directly into debates already poisoned by decades of ideological warfare and state-sponsored propaganda.

The tech giants are aware of the problem, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft and SpaceXAI spend fortunes on safety research, red-teaming and "alignment," and the ADL has acknowledged real progress over earlier generations of LLMs. Progress, however, leaves the essential question unanswered: who verifies? As these systems settle into classrooms, courtrooms, newsrooms and government agencies, independent audits by historians, specialists in antisemitism and researchers in information integrity should become as routine as penetration testing in cybersecurity, with methodologies and results open to public scrutiny. A civilization cannot outsource its historical memory based on corporate assurances.

Why single out antisemitism when LLMs can and do reproduce many prejudices and many inaccuracies? History has assigned it a diagnostic function. Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories have repeatedly served as the early-warning system of a broader collapse of the evidence on which free societies depend. The misinformation does stop at the Jews. There have also been acres of disinformation spreading the charms of socialism, climate change as an apocalyptic threat, how benign Communist China is, and how irrefutably accurate the number of eligible voters and ballots are in US elections.

The same intellectual habits that turned Jews into a universal explanation for every ailment in the world with the possible exception of climate change are also devouring freedom of expression and the rule of law. A society that accepts fiction about the Jews has already most likely begun accepting fiction about everything.

Human beings, not their machines, created this hatred; what the machines transform is its speed, reach and authority. The medieval preacher poisoned one village at a time, and the 20th-century propagandist needed a broadcast tower. The 21st-century propagandist needs only a smartphone or a laptop to reach nations, and a single AI platform answers hundreds of millions of users in dozens of languages within seconds. At that scale, accuracy stops being a technical objective and the AI systems can, and probably will, threaten democratic life.

The civilization that taught machines to diagnose disease and decode ancient languages now carries the responsibility of ensuring they do not also recycle its oldest lie, its youngest lie, and the trillions of lies in the middle. Once distorted versions of Jewish history, the Holocaust and Israel settle into systems that the public, erroneously or not, believes it can trust, extracting them will prove immeasurably harder than keeping them out.

Pierre Rehov, who holds a law degree from Paris-Assas, is a French reporter, novelist and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of six novels, including "Beyond Red Lines", "The Third Testament" and "Red Eden", translated from French. His latest essay on the aftermath of the October 7 massacre " 7 octobre - La riposte " became a bestseller in France. As a filmmaker, he has produced and directed 17 documentaries, many photographed at high risk in Middle Eastern war zones, and focusing on terrorism, media bias, and the persecution of Christians. His latest documentary, "Pogrom(s)" highlights the context of ancient Jew hatred within Muslim civilization as the main force behind the October 7 massacre.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/22873/artificial-intelligence-jew-hate

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Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc ahead of opposition as post-election vote count continues - Charles Bybelezer, Akiva Van Koningsveld

 

by Charles Bybelezer, Akiva Van Koningsveld

Partial results projected Netanyahu’s bloc securing the most seats, with Likud the largest party, albeit without a clear path to a governing majority.

 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara Netanyahu, cast their ballots at a polling station in Jerusalem, Oct. 27, 2026. Credit: Prime Minister’s Office.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc appeared to outperform most exit polls following Tuesday’s national election, pulling ahead of the opposition overnight, according to partial results published by Israel’s Central Elections Committee.

Netanyahu’s Likud party had 917,371 votes (20.84%) after 4,421,561 votes had been counted at 10,156 voting stations, the CEC said as of 12:32 p.m. on Wednesday.

Netanyahu’s bloc, which includes United Torah Judaism (266,553, 6.06%), Otzma Yehudit (240,905, 5.47%), Shas (240,739, 5.47%) and Religious Zionism-Zehut (208,499, 4.74%), had a collective 1,874,067 votes, or 42.57%.

Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar had 723,703 votes (16.44%). With his allies, B’Yachad (402,265, 9.14%), the Democrats (292,761, 6.65%) and Yisrael Beiteinu (266,200, 6.05%), he garnered a total of 1,684,929 votes, or 38.28%.

Based on partial results, Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc was projected to secure 54 seats, compared with 49 for the opposition and 17 for the Arab parties, though the figures remained subject to change, according to Israeli media.

While Netanyahu still lacked a clear path to the 61 seats needed to form a governing coalition, the partial results, if sustained, could put him in prime position to receive the first opportunity to form Israel’s next government.

Exit polls varied widely when polling stations closed at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, with Channel 14 projecting 30 Knesset seats for Likud, compared with 24 and 25 in projections by Channel 12 and Channel 13, respectively. Channel 14 projected 60 seats for Netanyahu’s bloc, while other exit polls showed a stronger performance by the opposition bloc led by Eisenkot.

Channel 12’s exit poll had projected 50 seats for Netanyahu’s bloc, 52 for the opposition and 18 for the Arab parties, whereas Channel 13’s had projected 50 seats for Netanyahu’s bloc, 53 for the opposition and 17 for the Arab parties.

Exit polls are often revised as votes are counted, while surplus-vote agreements between parties can also affect final seat totals. The counting of double-envelope ballots—cast by soldiers, evacuees and other eligible voters voting outside their regular polling stations—is expected to continue into Thursday. The final tally is expected by Friday.

‘Likud is the largest party’

Netanyahu on Tuesday night hailed the results of the vote, saying it showed beyond any doubt that the “Likud is the largest party in Israel.”

“Do you remember how the propaganda channels manipulated public opinion? Likud—18 seats, 19 seats—they knew all along that it was a lie,” Netanyahu said, referring to surveys published by various Israeli news channels.

“They tried to discourage you, simply discourage you, from going to the polls. That’s what happened here. Well, the first thing that has become unequivocally clear is that Likud is the largest party in Israel. There is no disputing that,” he continued.

The second thing that has become clear, according to the premier, “is that the right-wing bloc has a clear, overwhelming majority among the Zionist public, among the Jewish public, and among all those who support a Jewish state.”

Netanyahu stated, “And that is why I said, and I say again, that we must establish a strong national right-wing government ... We must not, absolutely must not, put Israel at risk by forming a government that relies on anti-Zionist parties—parties that oppose our very existence.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said in an X post on Tuesday night that “the left’s celebration is premature.”

“The certainties of biased commentators are ludicrous,” Sa’ar, a Knesset candidate for the Likud Party, wrote in Hebrew.

“One thing is reasonably clear: Likud is the biggest party in Israel,” he added.

In his post, Sa’ar shared archival footage of Menachem Begin, Likud’s founder and its first prime minister. In it, Begin is seen urging patience with results on the eve of the party’s historic 1977 breakthrough election victory.

Meanwhile, Eisenkot claimed that initial exit polls amounted to “a complete vote of no confidence” in Netanyahu and his government.

“If these are the final results, this is a victory for Israel’s statist Zionist majority,” Eisenkot wrote on X in Hebrew.

He pledged to act immediately to carry out “the people’s decision,” replace Netanyahu and form a “Zionist conscription government” as soon as possible.

Next steps

Once the official results are published on Nov. 4, Israeli President Isaac Herzog will consult party leaders before tasking the lawmaker he believes is best positioned to form a government with doing so.

That need not be the leader of the largest party, meaning Netanyahu is not guaranteed the opportunity.

Although no Israeli government has ever been formed by a minority coalition immediately after an election, Eisenkot told Ynet on Oct. 10 that he would seek to lead one if he fell short of a parliamentary majority, necessarily relying on the tacit outside support of Arab parties.

The government-formation process follows a timetable set by law. The first candidate Herzog designates receives 28 days, with a possible 14-day extension, to form a coalition. If he or she is unsuccessful, the president can assign another candidate 28 days. If that attempt also fails—or the president determines there is no possibility of forming a government—a coalition of at least 61 MKs have 21 days to request that the president designate an alternative candidate. That candidate then has 14 days to form a government.

Failure to establish a government would trigger another election approximately 90 days later. Herzog has pledged to try to avoid that outcome, declaring: “I really, truly will do all I can so there won’t be repeat elections.”

Some 7.33 million Israelis were eligible to vote on Tuesday, according to Israeli Central Elections Committee figures dated Sept. 6. That is an increase of 543,177 since the previous election in 2022.

Some 330,000 young Israelis were eligible to vote for the first time.

A total of 12,018 regular polling stations opened nationwide at 7 a.m. and closed at 10 p.m.

Election Day in Israel is a national holiday, with schools, kindergartens and most workplaces expected to close. Voters choose party lists rather than directly electing a prime minister. Lists must receive at least 3.25% of valid votes to enter the Knesset.

Military voting began on Oct. 21 at Israel Defense Forces bases and outposts across operational arenas, including in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. Eligible Israeli diplomats serving abroad and their family members began voting on Oct. 15.

The vote for the 26th Knesset marked the Jewish state’s first general election since the Hamas-led massacre on Oct. 7, 2023. 

Charles Bybelezer, Akiva Van Koningsveld

Source: https://www.jns.org/news/israel-news/netanyahus-right-wing-bloc-ahead-of-opposition-as-post-election-vote-count-continues

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Home is where the legacy is: Trump’s housing accomplishment that could remake neighborhoods - Amanda Head

 

by Amanda Head

The new Treasury rule would, with few exceptions, block large investors from purchasing single-family homes and converting them into multifamily housing, preserving the neighborhood atmosphere in diverse communities across the country.

 

President Trump has filled the first half of his second term instituting legacy-establishing policies and agendas, but a new measure restricting real estate investors may be his biggest legacy yet, according to Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

On Thursday, the Treasury Department proposed a rule implementing elements of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Starting January 7, 2027, investors controlling at least 350 single-family homes generally can't buy more unless an exception applies. 

Pulte: 'Not allowing corporations to dominate our subdivisions'

"This is going to be one of President Trump's biggest legacies in terms of making sure that the American people are reflected in their own communities. And I think you're going to see it happen here in the next 6, 12, 18 months," Pulte predicted in an interview on the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show.

Pulte, who also chairs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, continued, "But you're also going to see it for, you know, 5, 10, 15 years from now. He's forever changed the makeup of the nature of American neighborhoods by not allowing corporations to dominate our subdivisions."

The exceptions to the new rule include newly built homes bought within 18 months of completion and renovate-to-rent deals where investors fix code violations. Violations could cost from $1 million to as much as three times the home's purchase price. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has touted the rule as a booster to homeownership for working families.

U.S. shortfall is as high as 10 million single-family homes

America's housing crunch comes down to too few homes and costs that have outpaced incomes. How big the gap is depends on who's counting: the White House's Economic Report of the President estimates a shortage of 10 million single-family homes, while in 2024 Freddie Mac put it at 3.7 million units and Realtor.com more recently pegged it at just over 4 million. Construction hasn't caught up: Housing starts peaked near 2.5 million in 1972, about 1 million above early-2026 levels.

Renters feel it most. Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies found a record 22.7 million renter households, about 49%, were cost-burdened in 2024, including 12.1 million paying half or more of their income for housing. 

Buyers face their own wall: The income needed to qualify for a median-priced home rose from $79,600 in 2021 to $126,700 in 2024, and the typical first-time buyer's age hit 40, a record in the National Association of Realtors' tracking. Rising property taxes, insurance, prices, and mortgage rates keep squeezing owners and would-be buyers alike.

U.S. housing market in 1950s a very different picture

The postwar era built the modern American dream. Homeownership jumped to 55% in 1950 and 61.9% by 1960, powered by Federal Housing Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs mortgages, and Levitt & Sons borrowed auto assembly-line methods to build up to 30 houses a day. By 1960, a quarter of the nation's housing stock hadn't existed a decade earlier. 

That boom excluded many: The FHA and VA kept redlining, denying mortgages to black and other minority buyers, and no federal law banned housing discrimination until the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Mortgage rates hit the mid-teens in the early 1980s, and recessions plus high rates pushed homeownership down to 63.8% in 1986. Rates then fell steadily, and ownership peaked at 69% in 2004. Prices peaked in early 2005, and rising foreclosures set off a crisis that rippled through Wall Street, banking, and homebuilding. Homebuilding fell dramatically after 2008, a slowdown many link to today's shortage.

Amanda Head is White House Correspondent for Just the News. You can follow her here. 

Source: https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/trump-housing-legacy

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Europe: The New Totalitarians - Robert Williams

 

by Robert Williams

[German] Chancellor Friedrich Merz has made it clear that he wants to end anonymity on the internet.

 

• Internet anonymity makes it harder to arrest people for inconvenient speech -- "hate speech" and "insults" -- and Germany's police have been raiding the homes of such internet participants for years. Merz himself has filed hundreds of criminal complaints against ordinary German citizens perceived to have insulted him online, including against a 71-year-old pensioner who committed the unconscionable crime of calling him "Pinocchio" on Facebook....

• Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the totalitarian strain has become just as strong, if not worse. The government has been making examples of citizens who protest the mass migration, which has been continuing across the UK's open borders.

• By contrast, the men who were arrested on September 27 for what is believed to have been an Iranian-orchestrated attempted attack on England's RAF Fairford air base, used by U.S. warplanes to carry out strikes on Iran, were all released on bail the next day.

• [T]he UK government has released more than 70,000 criminals early since 2024 under the Labour government's plan to "combat jail overcrowding." So far, since their release, a third of those released have committed new crimes. One man sexually assaulted a woman the day he was freed. Some of the victims of the criminals released early have fled the country.

• The room they are eager to make in prisons seems to be for ordinary citizens fed up with how their country is run and had the gall to state it. That is how it works in totalitarian systems. Criminals are freed so that dissidents can take their places.

• Over three years of pro-Hamas protests inciting violence in the form of calling for a "global intifada" and "intifada revolution is the only solution" on the streets of Britain, not a single protester even came close to that kind of sentencing, even though Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organization in the UK. Protesters who wore the Hamas paraglider symbol or the Hamas headband were convicted of terrorism offenses but discharged by friendly judges and never served any time in prison.

• It is evidently all right to be carried away by emotion in favor of Hamas' mass slaughter, dismemberment and rape of Jews. The judge even seems to be saying that their view is understandable... When it comes to trying to protect your family from predatory third-world illegal male migrants arriving by the thousands on the shores of your country, that is not all right.

• This seems to be how the UK "justice" system works. If you support Hamas, a terrorist organization, it is considered either not really support at all, or not to cause "serious harm." Instead, protesting illegal immigration must immediately be punished with unconditional prison sentences. If this is not an example of the state emboldening terrorism, it would be hard to say what is.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has made it clear that he wants to end anonymity on the internet. "I want to see real names on the internet. I want to know who is speaking," he said. In other words, he wants the government, and the big tech companies, to know exactly who is behind every single comment, tweet, and meme on the internet. Pictured: Merz delivers a speech in Munich on October 24, 2026. (Photo by Alexandra Beier/ AFP via Getty Images)

Germany's governing coalition of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD), increasingly desperate to cling to power as the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) continues to hammer them in the polls, is turning ever more totalitarian.

For a start, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has made it clear that he wants to end anonymity on the internet.

"I want to see real names on the internet. I want to know who is speaking," Merz said back in February. "In politics, we engage in debates in our society using our real names and without visors."

In other words, Merz wants the government, and the big tech companies, to know exactly who is behind every single comment, tweet, and meme on the internet.

Internet anonymity makes it harder to arrest people for inconvenient speech -- "hate speech" and "insults" -- and Germany's police have been raiding the homes of such internet participants for years. Merz himself has filed hundreds of criminal complaints against ordinary German citizens perceived to have insulted him online, including against a 71-year-old pensioner who committed the unconscionable crime of calling him "Pinocchio" on Facebook, and others who called him "Lügenfritz" ("Lying Fritz") and "Lackaffe" (a poseur or slick monkey).

Insulting a politician is considered an especially monstrous crime in Germany – it carries a sentence of up to three years in prison or a fine. German police have entire specific departments, whose task it is to comb through the internet to detect people who dare to insult the Great German Leader or engage in other incommodious speech.

It appears that the end of internet anonymity in Germany may be fast approaching. On October 14, the government officially approved a policy framework establishing a roadmap to block children under 13 from major social media networks. This ban, however, would most likely to make it impossible for anyone to access social media without first identifying themselves. The most logical outcome will be identification taking place by means of a "Digital ID," which the European Union has demanded that every member country implement by the end of 2026.

The desire to see an end to internet anonymity is rife among European governments. The European Commission itself is currently working on a bill, known as the EU KIDS Act, that will ban social media for teenagers under a certain age, "to restrict social media platforms' access to children in the EU." Paired with the Digital ID, it is the easiest road to end anonymity on the internet. It may not happen immediately, but the EU train is barreling towards that goal.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the totalitarian strain has become just as strong, if not worse. The government has been making examples of citizens who protest the mass migration, which has been continuing across the UK's open borders. Most recently, Daniel Thomas, known as Danny Tommo, was arrested for criminal damage after he slashed an inflatable dinghy at sea, the kind of boat in which illegal migrants arrive. The government did not simply arrest him, but locked him in prison and refused to release him bail until his trial 17 months from now -- in March 2027.

By contrast, the men who were arrested on September 27 for what is believed to have been an Iranian-orchestrated attempted attack on England's RAF Fairford air base, used by U.S. warplanes to carry out strikes on Iran, were all released on bail the next day. Then again, the UK government has released more than 70,000 criminals early since 2024 under the Labour government's plan to "combat jail overcrowding." So far, since their release, a third of those released have committed new crimes. One man sexually assaulted a woman the day he was freed. Some of the victims of the criminals released early have fled the country.

"The early release scheme is necessary because without it prisons would get so full that police would not be able to make arrests" stated Jake Richards, the parliamentary under-secretary of state for sentencing. "Without intervention we risk running out of prison places, leaving courts unable to sentence offenders and police unable to make arrests."

The room they are eager to make in prisons seems to be for ordinary citizens fed up with how their country is run and had the gall to state it. That is how it works in totalitarian systems. Criminals are freed so that dissidents can take their places. In addition to Tommo, a man was recently arrested who protested against the arrival of a large dinghy carrying illegal immigrants by throwing a small empty plastic bottle into the air at a police line and then shouted "f--k off" at them. For this outrage he was arrested; his case was processed through the justice system at record speed, and he was sentenced to an unconditional two years in prison.

"Throwing a plastic bottle is simply about inflaming the actions of others. He lobbed it in that general direction. He is chucking something," the judge ruled.

"It is important to distinguish the right to peaceful protests and offences when people cease to protest peacefully. Many of those were wearing face coverings adding to the air of intimidation. The community impact of that night's violence has been profound.... this offence is so serious that the only punishment can be immediate imprisonment."

You don't say.

Over three years of pro-Hamas protests inciting violence in the form of calling for a "global intifada" and "intifada revolution is the only solution" on the streets of Britain, not a single protester even came close to that kind of sentencing, even though Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organization in the UK. Protesters who wore the Hamas paraglider symbol or the Hamas headband were convicted of terrorism offenses but discharged by friendly judges and never served any time in prison.

Judge Tan Ikram told the three women who used the paraglider symbols:

"You crossed the line, but it would have been fair to say that emotions ran very high on this issue. Your lesson has been well learned. I do not find you were seeking to show any support for Hamas."

It is evidently all right to be carried away by emotion in favor of Hamas' mass slaughter, dismemberment and rape of Jews. The judge even seems to be saying that their view is understandable, not a sign of support for terror. When it comes to trying to protect your family from predatory third-world illegal male migrants arriving by the thousands on the shores of your country, that is not all right.

"The offence here was Mr Hajsaad wearing a bandana at a demonstration," Judge Nina Tempia ruled in a Hamas headband case.

"In respect to harm, I agree with the prosecution that there was harm as the conduct linked to support of a proscribed organization. The offence was committed after (the October 7 attacks). Not days or weeks later, but seven weeks later. I would not classify the harm as serious." The terrorist supporter was spared both prison and fines "on account of his 'extremely limited budget' of £49 per week used for food and travel."

This seems to be how the UK "justice" system works. If you support Hamas, a terrorist organization, it is considered either not really support at all, or not to cause "serious harm." Instead, protesting illegal immigration must immediately be punished with unconditional prison sentences. If this is not an example of the state emboldening terrorism, it would be hard to say what is.

When ordinary citizens are imprisoned for standing up for the safety of their families and their country, while terrorist supporters are coddled, you know that your country is being ruled by what the late Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Łobaczewski, in his book Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil, Psychopathy, and the Origins of Totalitarianism, labeled them: "psychopaths."

Robert Williams is based in the United States.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/22942/europe-new-totalitarians

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The Road to Hell: Is There Really a Material Solution to Birth-Rate Decline? - Raw Egg Nationalist

by Raw Egg Nationalist

We’re stuck in a 2,000-year-old loop, repeating the same failed solutions with the same failed outcomes.

 

 

It’s been an interesting seven days for people who care about birth rates.

First, China’s State Council decreed that the government must offer greater support to families if more children are to be born. China currently has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates, about one birth per woman, well below the 2.1 replacement rate needed to maintain a stable population.

In January, it was announced that the country’s birth rate had fallen for the fourth consecutive year, reaching a record low as the population continues to shrink. The official birth rate fell 17 percent, from 9.54 million to 7.92 million, or 5.63 per 1,000 people, while the population fell by 3.39 million to 1.405 billion. China’s death rate—8.04 per 1,000 people—is the highest it’s been since 1968, in the third year of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which may have killed as many as eight million Chinese.

According to one demographer, Dr. Yi Fuxian, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, births in 2025 were “roughly the same level as in 1738, when China’s population was only about 100 million.”

Reuters reports that, at a meeting held on October 23, the State Council decided “the government should refine policies including those related to marriage, childbirth, child-rearing, and education, and optimize taxation, social security, and housing.”

The goal is to make China a “fertility-friendly society.”

The pledges, Reuters says, are a clear “sign that policymakers are concerned about the strain a shrinking and aging population could put on the country’s social insurance system and overall economic growth, which has been weighed down by weak domestic consumer demand.”

“Population is the foundational condition for economic and social development,” officials proclaimed.

The Chinese government has already attempted to make having children more affordable, introducing a nationwide childcare subsidy system and reducing preschool tuition fees. To make marriage more desirable, it relaxed a law that forced couples to marry in their place of residence. Three-and-a-half decades of anti-child conditioning, the fruits of the one-child policy, which only ended in 2015, have to be undone in the minds of ordinary Chinese. Many still remember the forced abortions and sterilizations.

Then came news that the U.S. is also experiencing a record decline in fertility. The general fertility rate—the number of births over the number of women of childbearing age—fell 1 percent from the previous record low in 2024 to 53.2 births per 1,000 women, or a birth rate of about 1.6 per woman, again well below the replacement rate, although still not as bad as China’s.

The U.S. teen birth rate, ages 15–19, dropped 7 percent. The rate fell 6 percent for women aged 20–24 and 4 percent for women aged 25–29. Only women aged 30 and over experienced an increase in births, and even then it was modest: 3 percent for women 30–34, 2 percent for 35–39, and 1 percent for 40–44.

Third and finally, a new scientific study showed that, far from increasing the birth rate, allowing women to work from home has the opposite effect. Demographers and social scientists have long believed that giving women more time to spend at home instead of being stuck in traffic or working late at the office would give couples more quality time together and reduce their stress—and more kids would naturally follow. Earlier comparative studies of multiple countries found that couples who work from home for at least one day a week have more children over their lifetimes than couples who don’t.

The pandemic, which drove an office exodus on an unprecedented scale, should have sparked a baby boom.

In reality, allowing significant numbers of women to work from home reduced annual birth rates among college-educated women, at the same time as increasing their employment levels and their earnings. Otherwise, the fertility rate didn’t budge an inch.

The study used data from close to 4 million American men and women aged 18 to 50 to reach its conclusions.

“Instead of increasing family size, greater access to remote work lowered birth rates. Between 2021 and 2024, each 15-point step up in a major’s remote-work score reduced annual births among college-educated women by 1.9 percent. The decline was driven entirely by married women, whose annual birth rates fell by about 2 percent, while birth rates for unmarried women and fertility rates for men showed no statistically significant change.

“At the same time, married women in remote-friendly fields stepped up their career commitments. For each 15-point increase in a major’s remote-work score, full-time employment among married women rose by 1.3 percent, and wage income among those with earnings climbed by 2.6 percent. Married women also increased their share of their couples’ combined income and became more likely to out-earn their husbands.”

By comparing pre- and post-pandemic data, the researchers were able to show that the move to full-time employment by women accounted for about half the decline in births. They debunked a number of theories for why remote work should increase the birth rate, including the theory that working from home allows men to share more of the parenting load, making it easier for mothers to have more children. Using housing data, they also showed that space was a key variable. In a house with three bedrooms or fewer, annual birth rates fell by more than 3 percent. In houses with four or more bedrooms, the rate stayed the same.

The implication, backed up by the data, is that sending women back to the office would actually increase birth rates. Fancy that.

Three big data points, all pointing towards the same worrying conclusion: The road to hell, by which I mean an aging, shrinking population, is paved with good intentions. Try as you might, you’re unlikely to make a meaningful difference, and in fact you’ll probably make things worse. That’s not a happy thought if you’re a social planner.

There’s something about fertility we just don’t seem to understand. I’ve been writing about it for years now with a particular focus on lifestyle factors like obesity, lack of exercise, and, in particular, exposure to hormone-disrupting chemicals known as endocrine disruptors, which are a ubiquitous part of modern life because of plastics, pesticides, food additives, personal-care products, and industrial pollution.

I made endocrine disruptors the subject of my appearance at the first Natal Conference, held in Austin, Texas, by Kevin Dolan’s EXIT Group, a Mormon fraternity that was formed to create alternative networks and new approaches to some of the West’s most pressing issues, including population decline. Like many religious groups, the Mormons still seem to be good at having children, although not as good as they used to be. Their current birth rate is 2.42, above replacement, but it’s fallen in recent decades and continues to fall. In 1981, it was 3.31.

As a repeat guest at the second conference, in 2025, I was billed as something more like a provocateur or a disruptor, which was fine by me. I forget the exact term that was used, but I was one of the last speakers on the last day, and my speech was intended to stick in people’s minds. The organizers wanted me to say something you weren’t going to hear from any of the economists, social scientists, venture capitalists, podcasters, or “hipster eugenicists” (The Guardian) in attendance, most of whom presented an optimistic vision of a future where having children is made easier and cooler by a range of carefully targeted material interventions.

And so this is what I said.

Although there are material causes of fertility decline, there is clearly something that evades our grasp, something less physical, less tangible but no less real: call it a moral or spiritual thing if you want. Until we get a real sense of it, nothing we try to do will work and, in fact, may prove counterproductive.

There couldn’t be a better example of the failure of conservative pro-natalism, as it’s often called, than Viktor Orban’s Hungary, which for 15 years served as the poster child for an “illiberal” new way of doing politics without mass immigration to maintain the human churn. Despite much-touted measures like the abolition of income tax for Hungarian women with more than four children, Hungary saw only a very modest bounce in birth rates, and nobody can really be sure it wasn’t just the long recovery from the Financial Crash of 2008.

But then, exactly the same thing happened in the first century AD, when the Roman emperor Augustus tried to promote motherhood and penalize men and women for being unmarried. A hundred years after the great emperor’s leges Iuliae, the Roman historian Tacitus would complain of exactly the same problems and look bitterly across the Rhine to the ancient Germans. There, at least, Tacitus remarked, “childlessness has no rewards.”

One of the most daring reformulations of the infertility problem in recent years has come from the once-anonymous internet figure Bronze Age Pervert in his book Bronze Age Mindset. It’s worth quoting the relevant passage in full.

Chimp in state of nature never jerks off, but in captivity he does, what does this mean? In state of nature he’s too busy, to put plainly. He is concerned with mastering space: solving problem of life in and under trees, mastering what tools he can, mastering social relations in the jockeying for power and status. Deprived of this drive to development and self-increase he devolves to pointless masturbation, in captivity, where he senses he is in owned space and therefore the futility of all his efforts and all his actions. The onanism of modern society is connected with its supposed “hyper-sexualization” and its infertility. It’s not really hyper-sexualization, but the devolution of the spirit to the lassitude of a diffuse and weak sexuality.

Don’t be fooled by the apparent ridiculousness of the image or the internet patois. This is deeply profound.

First, what he says is true at the base level. Chimps really do “devolve to pointless masturbation” in captivity. Recent studies have even shown them manufacturing primitive sex toys from rocks, something they’ve never been known to do in the wild. More broadly, we know that confinement has deleterious effects on the health, especially reproductive health, of a wide variety of animals. Pandas, who must be coaxed by zookeepers through a range of ingenious means to have sex, are of course the most famous example of this.

The deeper point, though, is that maybe we’re chimps in a zoo as well. A great big open-air zoo with all sorts of very complicated entertainments and diversions—sportsball, international travel, elections, movies-on-demand, AI chatbots we think are conscious, 4K HD porn, and burgers delivered to your front door by a man on a little bike—but a zoo nonetheless.

The idea that societies can become like zoos or even prisons, and that the modern world may be a uniquely fiendish zoo-prison, isn’t a new one. In fact, most people today have probably felt that claustrophobia and sense of encroaching confinement, the walls closing in, in their daily lives and given voice to it. “I’m trapped”—and maybe you are.

Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, described modern man as uniquely engaged in a series of “surrogate activities” that at best simulate but never match the satisfaction of the real struggles of life. The anthropologist David Graeber said most people now work “bullshit jobs,” but Kaczynski’s point is broader: It’s all bullshit, your job and everything else besides.

Other captive situations and experiments present even more worrying parallels with our present situation. Most notably, there’s the so-called “mouse utopia” experiment, where mice were allowed to breed for generations in a specially constructed environment with complete freedom from want and danger. After a certain number of generations of blissful hedonism, there was an explosion of morbid symptoms. The mouse utopia became mouse hell on earth. The fertility rate collapsed, and the mice began displaying aberrant behaviors that look uncomfortably familiar today. A new class of mice, dubbed “the beautiful ones,” emerged and would spend all their time grooming themselves, losing all interest in anything else, including reproduction. As I type, young men across the Western world are hitting their cheekbones with hammers in an attempt to “looksmaxx” and “mogg” lesser men.

My point isn’t that the modern world must be dismantled brick by brick to the ground, but that we’ve undergone radical changes to the way we live in, human terms, the blink of an eye, and we haven’t taken proper stock of what has changed, why, or the effects those changes have had on human beings as the complex animals we are, the emphasis being as much on our animality as on what separates us and makes us unique from chimps and pandas and mice in a lab. Statements like “Young people don’t have enough money to buy a home” or “Perhaps if women didn’t have to commute to work they’d be less stressed and more inclined to have children” may have some truth to them, but a simple-minded insistence that technical solutions alone can address our predicament just won’t do. The Augustus approach becomes the Orban approach, and things just continue to get worse.

We’re stuck in a 2,000-year-old loop, repeating the same failed solutions with the same failed outcomes. If that doesn’t fit the famous Einsteinian definition of insanity, I’m not sure what does.

The world has been, in Max Weber’s famous phrase, disenchanted, and our only hope, as far as I can see, will be to weave some fresh magic into our lives. I’m sorry I can’t be more precise than that. 

Raw Egg Nationalist is Dr. Charles Cornish-Dale, an Oxford- and Cambridge-educated historian and anthropologist. He has a large social media following, is a bestselling author, has appeared on national television, and has influenced debates on health, fitness, politics, and culture. His latest book is 'The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity.'

Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/10/28/the-road-to-hell-is-there-really-a-material-solution-to-birth-rate-decline/

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Draft Law returns: UTJ sets ultimatum for joining government - Israel National News

 

by Israel National News

United Torah Judaism demands law exempting yeshiva students from military service, refusing to aid coalition until law is passed

 

Haredim protest the Draft Law (illustrative)                                   Chaim Goldberg/Flash90

The Ashkenazi-haredi United Torah Judaism (UTJ) party has set strict conditions ahead of the expected coalition negotiations, despite the fact that not all votes have been counted yet.

The party emphasizes that legislation regulating the status of yeshiva students and their exemption from military service will be a non-negotiable prerequisite for joining any future government, regardless of which candidate is tasked with forming it.

A report published Wednesday morning in the haredi newspaper Hamevaser stressed that the commitment included in the joint electoral agreement between UTJ's Agudat Yisrael and Degel HaTorah factions remains in force and has now taken on renewed significance.

Party officials attribute their firm position to the difficult period experienced by the haredi community, which has included enforcement measures, arrests of yeshiva students, and financial sanctions. They emphasize that this time, they will not settle for vague promises regarding future legislation.

The internal agreement between the two factions establishes three binding conditions that will guide UTJ's Knesset members during coalition negotiations.

First, the party will demand legislation granting a full exemption from military service to every yeshiva student whose full-time occupation is Torah study, without criminal or financial sanctions.

Second, UTJ will refuse to support coalition-sponsored legislation until the military draft exemption law has been fully legislated, with exceptions only for specific bills explicitly approved by the party's senior Torah scholars.

Third, the party's representatives will not serve as ministers, deputy ministers, or chairmen of Knesset committees until the legislation has been formally approved. 

Israel National News

Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/435288

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Netanyahu trial: Judges raise concerns over allegedly illegal investigations - Hezki Baruch

 

by Hezki Baruch

Judges question the prosecution's attempt to limit Mandelblit's cross-examination, raising concerns over investigative actions and possible abuse of process.

 

Avichai Mandelblit                                                                      Oren Ben Hakoon/Flash90

 

A dispute arose Wednesday morning between the prosecution and the judges presiding over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's trial regarding the scope of the cross-examination of former Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit.

The prosecution sought to prevent the defense from expanding the cross-examination to actions taken by police investigators after receiving Mandelblit's authorization. However, the judges raised questions about the importance of this information in examining the defense's arguments.

At the center of the dispute is whether Mandelblit can be questioned only about his authorization to open investigations against Netanyahu, or also about the extent of his involvement and oversight as the investigations progressed.

Until now, the defense's questioning has focused on decisions made before the authorizations were granted and the circumstances surrounding them. The defense attorneys now seek to examine the investigative actions carried out following those authorizations.

Prosecutor Yehudit Tirosh argued that questions directed at Mandelblit should be limited to matters essential to the proceedings, particularly the authorizations he granted.

According to Tirosh, expanding the questioning to the prosecution's internal working procedures could set a precedent affecting other criminal cases.

Tirosh explained that prosecutorial decisions are made through professional officials and working teams, rather than necessarily by a single individual who reviews every document. Therefore, she argued, there is no justification for questioning the former Attorney General about every detail of the investigative materials.

She also cited case law indicating that courts generally avoid summoning prosecutors to testify about internal decision-making processes within prosecutorial authorities.

Tirosh maintained that the legal requirement for the Attorney General's approval to indict a prime minister does not justify treating Mandelblit differently from other prosecution officials.

The prosecution's position prompted questions from the panel of judges. Judge Moshe Bar-Am questioned how Mandelblit's cross-examination could be restricted when his testimony had already raised issues concerning the legality of investigative actions.

"How can we ignore the fact that the Attorney General comes here and testifies about illegal actions?" Bar-Am asked.

Judge Rivka Friedman-Feldman noted that Mandelblit had testified that he had not reviewed some of the materials, including certain transcripts.

Bar-Am added that the testimony heard so far could be relevant to the defense's claims of abuse of process. He warned that preventing further questions could leave gaps in the factual picture before the court.

Tirosh, however, argued that a distinction must be made between questions concerning the Attorney General's decisions and inquiries into actions taken by police investigators. In her view, allegations concerning investigative actions that were not properly documented should be directed at the investigators themselves.

The current dispute follows Mandelblit's previous testimony, during which questions arose regarding the limits of the authorizations he granted for the investigations against Netanyahu, including in Case 1000.

During that hearing, Mandelblit was asked whether he had authorized an investigation into suspected bribery. He explained that his authorizations concerned subjects of investigation rather than necessarily every specific offense or investigative action.

"I authorized a subject. That is not the same as questioning a suspect under caution. I do not authorize a specific investigation, but rather subjects for investigation," he clarified.

Mandelblit explained that after granting authorization, he maintained professional contact with investigators and expected major investigative actions to be submitted for his review before they were carried out.

Judge Bar-Am sought to understand how investigators knew which actions they were permitted to take under the general authorization.

"The question is what police investigators understand when they receive the general authorization. Perhaps a more specific authorization should be given so that they do not inadvertently do something prohibited," the judge remarked.

In response, Mandelblit explained that follow-up meetings were held to oversee the progress of the investigations and that, whenever significant new investigative directions emerged, investigators were required to return to him for appropriate authorization.

Hezki Baruch

Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/435294

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The year-end tax fight could be shaped by a 'nonpartisan' Yale lab founded by ex-Biden officials - Ashe Short

 

by Ashe Short

When Congress comes back after the midterms to deal with the Dec. 11 funding deadline and a possible year-end tax package, lawmakers may lean on the Yale lab’s estimates to argue that pouring billions more into the IRS will pay for itself, even though other analysts put the return at a fraction of that.

 

When Senate Democrats rolled out a bill in April to pour about $83 billion more into IRS enforcement, their estimates for how much the bill would raise came from a Yale research shop founded by three former Biden administration economists presenting itself as nonpartisan.

The Budget Lab (TBL) at Yale claimed the Stop CHEATERS Act would raise about $998 billion over 10 years, a figure that came from a private request for analysis by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on March 24, 2026, just three weeks before the bill was introduced on April 15. 

Two days after the bill was introduced, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog that endorsed the bill, estimated that it would raise $100 billion to $200 billion. The CRFB said the Budget Lab’s figure “appears far above consensus.”

Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, previously called the TBL “just another Democrat think tank full of economists that consistently get it wrong.”

TBL describes itself as “a non-partisan policy research center dedicated to providing in-depth analysis of federal policy proposals for the American economy,” but its analyses, staff and funding largely skew to the political left.

Democratic lawmakers repeatedly cited TBL, even though its scores run well above the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) past research when it comes to IRS enforcement. 

The lab’s own research acknowledges this, but the lab will likely continue to be cited when Congress returns after the midterms and is facing a Dec. 11 funding deadline with a possible year-end tax package.

TBL’s response to Warren’s requested analysis for her bill also found the estimated $998 billion in net revenue was roughly 13 times the upfront investment of $83 billion in IRS enforcement. The TBL also claimed the bill would deliver $127 billion and $11 billion in net revenue in its second and third decades, respectively.

The gap between the TBL’s estimates and the CBO and CRFB’s estimates can be attributed to the TBL’s inclusion of a “deterrence” multiplier that is not included in CBO’s conventional scoring. 

The multiplier purports to account for the way taxpayers would change their behavior to comply with tax laws due to increased IRS enforcement activity. Democrats took the higher estimates from the TBL and presented them as a certainty, without mentioning lower estimates from more traditional sources.

TBL was launched in April 2024 at Yale Law School by former Biden administration economists Natasha Sarin, who served as counselor to then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen; Danny Yagan, formerly the chief economist at the White House Office of Management and Budget; and Martha Gimbel, a former senior adviser for the White House Council of Economic Advisers. In June, the Washington Free Beacon reported that TBL staff and board members donated $102,675 to liberal candidates or causes and none to Republicans or conservative causes.

The Budget Lab did not respond to a Just the News inquiry prior to press time.

The TBL is funded in part by the Ford Foundation, a major left-wing nonprofit, among other left-leaning organizations. 

Yagan’s brother, Sam, is one of the trustees for his family’s foundation, which has also given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the TBL, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The TBL’s website also lists the Smith Richardson Foundation as a donor, which is generally considered a conservative-leaning nonprofit. Arnold Ventures and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation are also listed as donors, and are both organizations concerned with the deficit.

And while the TBL is mainly used by Democrats, it did provide analysis for Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, on the Family Security Act.

When Congress returns after the Nov. 3 midterms, it is expected to pick up a continuing resolution that expires on Dec. 11 and a possible year-end tax package, among other unfinished votes. The TBL could be used to bolster Democratic priorities, especially if they win the House or Senate or both. 

Ashe Short

Source: https://justthenews.com/accountability/watchdogs/year-end-tax-fight-could-be-shaped-nonpartisan-yale-lab-founded-ex-biden

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New federal case against James Comey centers again on alleged leak of classified information - Steven Richards

 

by Steven Richards

Federal prosecutors are trying to establish that the former FBI director fired by President Trump in his first term directed a leak of national defense information to a journalist.

 

A third federal case against James Comey, which was unsealed Monday, centers once again on evidence the former FBI director allegedly directed his staff to leak classified information to the press.

The “criminal information” filing submitted to the court by prosecutors earlier this month, and made public Monday, contains allegations that Comey “communicated” or “transmitted” national defense information to an individual not cleared to receive it, in this case, a reporter.

The new case, filed under seal Oct. 5 in federal court in Washington, D.C., also includes charges alleging Comey conspired with others to leak the information. It alleges that Comey, “through one and more co-conspirators,” directed a person identified only as “Individual #1” to disclose the information to a reporter for a national news publication.

Prosecutors later identified the previously unnamed reporter as Charlie Savage, of The New York Times, according to an Oct. 23 government filing, which was unsealed along with the criminal information filing.  

The story referenced in the case is Savage’s Oct. 5, 2016, article headlined “Yahoo Said to Have Aided U.S. Email Surveillance by Adapting Spam Filter,” which described how Yahoo complied with a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order to scan customer emails.

“The United States’ investigation has uncovered evidence that former FBI Director, James B. Comey, sought to correct misinformation which had appeared in the press by way of Reuters the day before,” Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Dustin Farahnak wrote in the subsequent filing. “The investigation has uncovered evidence that Mr. Comey directed staff to speak to Mr. Savage about specific accuracy concerns related to the Reuters article, and thereby illegally transferred classified information.”

U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden unsealed the case Monday at Comey’s request, writing that “criminal charges against a former FBI director for his conduct while in office are of significant public interest.”

Comey, who has denied wrongdoing in all three cases, responded in a video posted Monday.

“Well, they’re back – again,” he said. “It would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice, one that we cannot become numb to. … I’m still innocent. I’m still not afraid of these people.”

A race against the statute of limitations

Federal felony charges are ordinarily brought by a grand jury indictment.  A criminal information filing, by contrast, is filed by prosecutors alone, without a grand jury vote or a judge’s finding of probable cause. Comey cannot face trial on criminal information alone unless he waives indictment. 

The Justice Department said it filed the information on the anniversary of the article to keep the 10-year statute of limitations from expiring while it continues pursuing the case.

Comey’s lawyers moved earlier this month to dismiss the case, arguing that both counts “are based exclusively on the October 5, 2016, alleged disclosure exactly ten years before the government’s filed criminal information.”

“The applicable statute of limitations explicitly demands an indictment within 10 years of the offense; an information [filing] does not suffice,” they wrote. “An indictment fundamentally differs from an information" filing.  

The judge has not ruled on the motion.

Comey attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said the leak had already been examined and closed twice.

“This most recent case involves an October 5, 2016 New York Times article that two different teams of prosecutors investigated during the first Trump administration,” Fitzgerald said. “Both times the Government determined that no charges should be brought against anyone.”

What earlier leak probes found

Just the News previously reported on declassified FBI memos detailing “Tropic Vortex,” a classified-leak investigation that then-U.S. Attorney John Durham and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service opened in March 2017. The D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office later took it over and declined to prosecute in January 2020.

The timing in those memos line up with the information provided in the unsealed court documents this week, but it is not clear if both are referring to the same articles. The memos said Tropic Vortex centered on an “October 2016” Times article that cited two government sources, one of them then-FBI General Counsel James Baker. 

“The USPIS Investigation also revealed Baker disclosed USG [U.S. government] classified information to the NYT under the belief he was ultimately instructed and authorized to do so by then FBI Director James Comey," one summary memo reads. "For example, during interviews, Baker indicated FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki instructed him (Baker) to disclose the information to the NYT, and Baker understood Rybicki was conveying this instruction and authorization from Comey.”

The new charging documents do not name Individual #1 or the alleged co-conspirators, and prosecutors have not said whether the case grows out of Tropic Vortex. 

Comey’s first indictment, in September 2025, also centered on media leaks. It charged that he lied to Congress in 2020 when he denied authorizing anyone at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports. Sources previously told Just the News the person Comey allegedly authorized was his friend and FBI special government employee Daniel Richman.

Richman told agents in a separate leak probe, code-named “Arctic Haze,” that he communicated with New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt “to correct stories critical of Comey, the FBI and to shape future press coverage,” according to FBI memos Just the News first reported. Asked whether he passed classified information to Schmidt, Richman said he was sure “with a discount” that he had not.

Prosecutors later filed emails showing Comey urging Richman in November 2016 about a Times reporter’s coverage of the Clinton email probe. “Perhaps you can make him smarter,” Comey wrote, according to the Justice Department filing.

That case was dismissed in November 2025 after a judge found that the prosecutor who secured it, Lindsey Halligan, had been unlawfully appointed. Comey was indicted again in April in North Carolina over his “86 47” seashell post; that case is set for trial in February 2027. Prosecutors allege the phrase should be interpreted as a call to 86 – "kill" – the 47th president, Donald Trump. 

Steven Richards

Source: https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/new-federal-case-against-james-comey-centers-again-leak-classified

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