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This article originally appeared on the Daily Caller News Foundation and was republished with permission.

Guest post by Nick Naulty

Americans may be paying a hidden “lawsuit tax” through higher insurance premiums and higher prices for everyday goods, as trucking companies face rising litigation costs from staged crashes, massive settlements and “nuclear verdicts.”

Industry groups and lawsuit abuse critics told the Daily Caller News Foundation that costs from frivolous lawsuits and rising settlements are being passed down to consumers through elevated insurance premiums, higher transportation costs and inflated prices for everyday goods. They argue those costs are especially hitting the trucking industry, where rising commercial insurance premiums can ripple through freight rates, grocery bills, consumer goods and even personal auto insurance premiums.

“Abusive litigation practices against the trucking industry are driving up costs for consumers, destroying small businesses, and undermining public safety.” Henry Hanscom, American Trucking Association’s (ATA) chief advocacy & public affairs officer, told the DCNF.

The number of filed cases involving tractor-trailers has increased at an annual rate of 3.7% between 2014 and 2023, according to a study by the American Transportation Research Institute. This comes as the personal injury market size rose 2.5% CAGR between 2020 and 2025, according to IBIS World.

Auto insurance premiums have been rising since February 2020, and insurance premiums have soared by 55%, according to NPR.

The Surface Transportation Reauthorization Act is set to expire in September and is considered must-pass legislation, as it sets federal transportation funding and policy. ATA supports including several lawsuit-abuse measures in the package or another legislative route, though it remains unclear if lawmakers will include those reforms in the final bill.

ATA Chairman Greg Hodgen and a group of trucking industry members met with both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees in April to discuss lawsuit abuse targeting the industry, including staged accidents, forum shopping, third-party litigation funding and frivolous lawsuits, Hanscom told the DCNF.

After hearing about the surge in staged crashes and the roughly $4,200 a year it adds to the average family’s costs, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan said he wants to take a closer look at it.

A spokesperson from Jordan’s office confirmed to the DCNF that the Representative’s office is “looking into it.”

In October 2025, Georgia Republican Rep. Mike Collins introduced the Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act of 2025, which aims to reduce frivolous suits in federal courts by imposing mandatory sanctions on attorneys who file them. It ends the 21-day “safe harbor” rule that allows attorneys to withdraw frivolous filings in that timeframe without consequences.

The bill has gained support from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and is pending before the House Judiciary Committee.

A similar version of the legislation was introduced in 2017, but it ended up dying in the Senate Judiciary Committee after passing the House.

The bill faced strong opposition from the American Bar Association (ABA) and the American Association for Justice (AAJ), where the two spent over $7 million lobbying in 2017, according to Open Secrets.

In September 2025, Congress introduced the FAIR Trucking Act, legislation that seeks to curb “nuclear verdicts” against the trucking industry. Nuclear verdicts are high jury awards in personal injury cases that can exceed $10 million, and can lead to bankruptcy for freight carriers. Nearly 80% of trucking-related verdicts exceed $1 million, according to an American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) report.

Since the introduction of the FAIR Trucking Act, the AAJ has lobbied heavily against the measure, according to lobbying reports obtained by the DCNF.

“The insurance industry raked in $169 billion in profits in 2024 while denying Americans’ claims after catastrophic events and jacking up rates for policyholders year after year,” AAJ spokesperson Heather Sager told the DCNF. “So, it’s no surprise they’re trying to point the finger at anyone willing to hold them to account.”

“This is a tale as old as time — for decades, corporations who can’t justify their treatment of American consumers attempt to blame those holding them accountable while pushing legislation that would shield them from accountability,” Sager added.

The risk of litigation is negatively affecting freight industry insurance, where settlements frequently reach millions of dollars. In 2025, some trucking companies experienced premium increases of 20-30% in just one year, according to FreightWaves.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court declined to limit freight broker liability in the Montgomery v. Caribe Transport case, which addressed whether freight brokers can be sued under state law for hiring unsafe motor carriers, leaving business groups warning that shipping companies could face a patchwork of state liability rules.

“Without a uniform standard, every small business who uses a trucking company will be hit with higher costs and reduced availability as the resulting patchwork of rules and risk ricochets through the supply chain,” Beth Milito, vice president and executive director of NFIB’s Small Business Legal Center, said in a press release following the decision.

The ruling leaves freight brokers facing state-by-state liability risks that could drive up insurance and shipping costs across the supply chain.

Hanscom said rising litigation costs have driven up commercial auto insurance premiums across the trucking industry, with liability insurance premiums increasing 18.6% between 2021 and 2024, “outpacing consumer inflation,” even as heavy-duty truck crash rates declined by as much as 3.1%.

“These soaring insurance costs year-over-year are putting enormous financial strain on trucking companies at a time when the industry is grappling with a prolonged freight recession,” he said. “It’s pushing many motor carriers to the brink.”

The trucking industry moves roughly 70% of U.S. goods, meaning higher freight insurance costs can spill over to consumers. Over the next decade, litigation is expected to contribute 15% of the inflation in food costs, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform.

The proposals include legislation that seeks to target staged highway accidents involving commercial trucks, forum shopping, frivolous lawsuits and third-party litigation funding.

The AAJ, the largest trial bar association, acting as the leading advocacy and lobbying organization for plaintiffs’ attorneys, stated that insurance companies and corporations are attempting to shift the blame for rising premium costs.

“Lawsuit abuse against the trucking industry hits consumers in two ways,” Hanscom told the DCNF. “Since virtually every good travels on the back of a truck at one point in time, increases in freight transportation costs are reflected in the cost of goods.”

Hanscom added that rising premiums in the commercial auto sector also “put upward pressure on the consumer auto insurance market.”

In 2023, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 837 into law, aiming to reduce frivolous lawsuits and insurance litigation by altering negligence standards, all in an attempt to combat high premiums.

The effects of the reform were felt rapidly, as the top five auto insurance groups saw an average rate decrease of 6.5%, according to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation.

As insurance premiums skyrocket nationwide, states are now signaling similar reforms to tort laws, including New York, where insurance rates rank among the fourth-highest in the nation.

“You can have a situation where someone causes the accident intentionally and gets a huge personal injury payout. So we’re putting the brakes on that fraud. Enough is enough here in the State of New York,” Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a statement released in February.

“We’ll start by reforming our tort laws to protect people who play by the rules and insulate the personal injury system from abuse,” Hochul added.

Copyright 2026 Daily Caller News Foundation

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This article originally appeared on Sayer Ji’s Substack and was republished with permission.

Guest post by Sayer Ji

On May 14, The Telegraph’s “Global Health Security” desk published a story with a headline engineered for maximum alarm: “Hantavirus may survive in human sperm for up to six years and cause a transmission risk.”

Within hours, the story was syndicated across international outlets like Yahoo News, tied to the eight confirmed hantavirus cases aboard the MV Hondius cruise ship and the 20 asymptomatic British passengers now isolating under UKHSA monitoring.

Sayer Ji@sayerjigmi

1/🚨A single Swiss man’s semen sample is now international headline news.

“Hantavirus may survive in sperm for 6 years — sexual transmission risk!” – @Telegraph

The study: N=1. No live virus ever isolated. No human sexual transmission documented in history.

Here’s who profits

11:16 PM · May 14, 2026 · 6.6K Views

21 Replies · 57 Reposts · 115 Likes

The pitch is irresistible: a stealth virus, hiding in the male reproductive tract for years after recovery, primed for sexual transmission. The recommendation, sourced to a private “global health risk” analytics firm called Airfinity, was that male patients should receive “extensive safe-sex guidance beyond the 42-day quarantine,” analogous to the WHO’s Ebola survivor semen-monitoring protocols.

There is just one problem.

The underlying study does not support the headline. It does not support the policy recommendation. It does not even support the word “sperm.”

What it supports is a much smaller, much more honest claim: that fragments of viral RNA were detected in one 55-year-old Swiss man’s ejaculate for an unusually long time, without any evidence that the virus is alive, transmissible or has ever been sexually transmitted by anyone, ever, in the recorded history of hantavirus research.

Let me walk you through what the actual paper says — and then show you who paid for the panic.

The paper is titled “Presence and Persistence of Andes Virus RNA in Human Semen,” published in the open-access MDPI journal Viruses in November 2023.

The lead institution is Spiez Laboratory — “the Swiss Federal Office for Civil Protection” — which, in plain English, is Switzerland’s nuclear, biological and chemical defense laboratory.

A biodefense lab. Remember this.

Here is what the study actually establishes, in the authors’ own words:

From the paper’s discussion section: “Unfortunately, the isolation of the infectious virus was not successful for any of the samples or culture systems used.”

They tried. They selected three semen samples with the highest detectable viral RNA (collected 40, 82 and 320 days after the patient first got sick) and attempted to grow live virus in five different cell systems — Vero E6 cells, BSR/Vero mixes, primary human bronchial epithelial cells, primary human nasal epithelial cells and 3D human airway epithelia.

They passaged the samples repeatedly. They even homogenized sperm cells directly and tried that. Nothing grew.

This is the central fact that the Telegraph buried. Without isolation of the infectious virus, the claim that hantavirus “survives” in semen is doing extraordinary work on the verb “survives.” What survives is genetic material — RNA fragments.

Whether any of that RNA is packaged inside functional, replication-competent viral particles capable of infecting another human cell remains completely unproven by this study.

2. The virus shows almost no replication.

The authors sequenced the viral genome from samples taken 247 days apart and 1,978 days apart. They found a 33-base-pair deletion in a non-coding region and three single-nucleotide variants in total. RNA viruses normally mutate at rates of 10⁻⁶ to 10⁻⁴ substitutions per nucleotide per cell infection.

The authors’ own conclusion: the virus “persisted within cells of the male reproductive tract with only very limited replication activity.”

A virus that isn’t replicating isn’t producing the viral load required for transmission. The authors say this. The Telegraph does not.

When the researchers separated the cells from the seminal plasma, the viral signal was overwhelmingly intracellular. But which cells?

Their own answer: “It remains to be determined which cell type carries the virus. Besides spermatozoal cells, ejaculates contain germinal elements, neutrophils, macrophages, lymphocytes, epithelial cells and Sertoli cells.”

The Telegraph wrote about hantavirus “in sperm.”

The study cannot tell you whether the virus is in sperm at all. It might be in immune cells. It might be in the shed epithelial cells from the reproductive tract lining. These have radically different implications for what “sexual transmission” would even mean.

The patient’s neutralizing antibody titer peaked above 30,000 by day 21 of illness and has remained at high levels for the entire six-year follow-up.

The authors explicitly note: “Repeated symptomatic infection with hantaviruses have not been observed, suggesting life-long protection.” Any virus exiting his testes would walk into an immune buzzsaw.

The paper’s actual closing claim, hedged with care: “Taken together, our results show that ANDV has the potential for sexual transmission.”

Potential. A hypothesis. Not a finding. The authors elsewhere acknowledge: “Although transmission via sexual contact has not been documented, high viral loads and extensive contact among people may contribute to a higher likelihood of transmission.”

Sample size of the entire study: one patient. The authors say so in their stated limitations: “The limitation of this study is the small sample size. It remains to be determined whether persistence occurs in a larger population of long-term Andes virus disease survivors.”

This is not a transmission scare. This is N=1 hypothesis generation. And the international press has converted it into a global sexual-transmission emergency.

The question is: who benefits when that conversion happens? Follow the money.

At the bottom of the Telegraph’s hantavirus article is a small badge linking to the desk’s about page. That page contains the following disclosure:

“Our Global Health Security coverage is partly funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”

The desk exists because Gates pays for it. Its remit, per its own description, includes “pandemic threats and outbreaks of significance,” “the spread of other communicable diseases like Ebola and Zika as well as a wide range of rare diseases” and “the growing threat of bio-terrorism.”

Read that list. The desk is not funded to cover heart disease, road deaths, suicide, alcohol or air pollution — the actual leading killers of human beings. It is funded to cover the threats whose amplification benefits the funder’s pandemic preparedness portfolio.

This is not a conspiracy claim. This is the explicit, public-facing funding structure of the desk.

The Telegraph adds the standard disclaimer: “This support comes without strings and The Telegraph retains full editorial control.”

Editorial control is irrelevant when the selection of topics covered is itself the lever. A desk paid to find pandemic stories will find pandemic stories.

A single-patient case report in MDPI’s Viruses will not enter mainstream consciousness on its own. It enters mainstream consciousness when there is a funded apparatus whose institutional survival depends on stories like it.

The Telegraph article cites “analysts at Airfinity, a company that tracks global health risks,” recommending that hantavirus survivors receive Ebola-style semen monitoring protocols.

Airfinity is described in standard business databases as a “data driven scientific intelligence platform and predictive analytics for the life science industry,” with a “risk surveillance and analytics platform monitoring over 160 infectious diseases to assess outbreak risks and pandemic preparedness.”

Its customer base, in its own words: “the full ecosystem in life sciences, including pharma companies, government agencies, corporates, investors, NGOs, and international organisations.”

In other words: Airfinity is a commercial biosurveillance company whose business model requires elevated perceived pandemic risk.

The interesting investor in Airfinity’s cap table is not Gresham House Ventures or The FSE Group. It is In-Q-Tel (IQT), identified in business filings as an Airfinity investor.

In-Q-Tel is, per Wikipedia and multiple independent sources, the venture capital arm of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

It was “conceptualized and chartered by the CIA, with which it still has contracts,” and exists to “identify, evaluate, and leverage emerging commercial technologies for the U.S. national security community.”

IQT’s portfolio famously includes Palantir and the company that became Google Earth. It is now invested in pandemic biosurveillance.

So when The Telegraph’s Gates-funded desk quotes “analysts at Airfinity” recommending expanded quarantine and surveillance protocols, what is actually happening is this: a commercial biosurveillance firm with CIA venture capital is being presented to the public as a neutral expert source on whether expanded biosurveillance is warranted.

It is not a neutral source. It sells the product that the policy would mandate.

The original Viruses paper was produced at Spiez Laboratory — Switzerland’s federal biological and chemical defense facility.

This is not a public health lab. It is a biodefense institution whose mission framing includes preparation for biological warfare and bioterrorism scenarios.

A biodefense lab finding viral persistence in an immune-privileged site is interesting science.

A biodefense lab’s interesting science being amplified by a CIA-invested biosurveillance firm and a Gates-funded journalism desk into a global transmission scare is not science communication. It is a biodefense capability marketing wearing public health clothing.

Airfinity’s specific recommendation in the Telegraph piece is that hantavirus survivors should be monitored “analogous to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Ebola survivor semen-monitoring protocols.”

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the WHO’s largest donors. Gates’ contributions to the WHO have, in some recent years, exceeded those of most member states.

So now follow the structure of the citation loop:

1. Spiez Laboratory (Swiss biodefense) produces a one-patient case report.

2. Airfinity (CIA-invested biosurveillance) amplifies it with policy recommendations.

3. The Telegraph’s Global Health Security desk (Gates-funded) packages it for the public.

4. The recommended protocols cite the WHO (Gates-funded) authority.

5. Public pressure for those protocols expands biosurveillance budgets, which fund firms like Airfinity, which justifies further IQT investment, which generates more case reports, which feed more Telegraph stories.

Each actor citing the next creates the appearance of independent expert confirmation. It is not independent. It is one funded ecosystem talking to itself, with a single Swiss man’s RNA fragments as the seed crystal.

No one in this chain needs to be lying. No one needs to be coordinating. Each actor is simply doing the funded job that their institutional position rewards them for doing.

The output of that ecosystem, however, is a public consciousness saturated with pandemic dread proportionate not to actual disease burden but to the institutional needs of the apparatus.

The official account is that the case fatality rate for hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome is high — between 25% and 40%, depending on the outbreak. Total annual hantavirus deaths globally are stated to be in the hundreds. Compare:

• Tobacco kills approximately 8 million people every year globally.

• Air pollution kills approximately 7 million people every year globally.

• Alcohol kills approximately 2.6 million people every year globally.

• Road traffic kills approximately 1.2 million people every year globally.

• Suicide kills more than 700,000 people every year globally.

None of these has a CIA-invested biosurveillance firm, a Gates-funded journalism desk and a Swiss biodefense laboratory amplifying preliminary findings into headline news.

There is no Airfinity for ultraprocessed food.

There is no In-Q-Tel-backed startup tracking the public health impact of sedentary work. The WHO does not publish 42-day quarantine protocols for the actual leading causes of preventable death.

The hantavirus story is not just disproportionate. The disproportion is the product.

Public attention is a finite resource. Every column inch spent on whether a Swiss man’s six-year-old viral RNA fragments might theoretically transmit sexually is an inch not spent on the killers without a funded amplification apparatus behind them.

This is the deepest layer of the critique. The biosurveillance ecosystem does not just inflate certain risks. It crowds out attention to risks that do not fit its business model.

That is not a journalism failure. That is journalism functioning exactly as its funding incentivizes it to function.

“Swiss researchers detect viral RNA fragments in one recovered hantavirus patient’s semen years after recovery. Could not isolate live virus. No sexual transmission of hantavirus has ever been documented in any patient ever.”

This is the actual finding. It is genuinely scientifically interesting. It belongs in a virology journal, where it was, until a funded ecosystem decided otherwise.

You were not told this version of the story because the version you were told was the one the apparatus paid to be told.

Copyright 2026 Sayer Ji

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This article originally appeared on m o d e r n i t y and was republished with permission.

Guest post by @ModernityNews

The Telegraph has published a piece so tone-deaf it reads like self-parody. According to the outlet, the “far-right” is no longer the domain of bald men in boots and tattoos. No, it’s now being led by “strikingly telegenic young women” who dare to look good on camera while warning about mass migration, grooming gangs, and cultural replacement.

Three foreign activists – Ada Lluch, Valentina Gomez, and Eva Vlaardingerbroek – were banned from entering Britain for a Tommy Robinson rally, and the Telegraph can’t stop gushing over how “pretty” this makes the movement look.

The government has banned at least seven foreign voices from attending the rally, including the women highlighted by the Telegraph.

Critics point out the blatant double standard: pro-Palestine marches with openly extremist rhetoric are often tolerated, while a native-focused demonstration drawing tens or hundreds of thousands draws preemptive visa blocks on speakers.

Kier Starmer’s government waves in unvetted migrants and certain extremists but draws the line at articulate critics of mass migration.

The Telegraph profiles the banned women in breathless detail. Catalan activist Ada Lluch has called out “complete invasion” of western democracies, American influencer Valentina Gomez warned about “rapist Muslims taking over,” and Dutch commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek spoke of “the rape, replacement and murder of our people.”

All three were barred from the UK, along with several other activists. Meanwhile, the government continues to wave in the very people these women are warning about.

The Telegraph also warns about attractive home-grown women, including British influencer Saskia Teague. With over 100,000 Instagram followers, she mixes “happy happy happy” selfies with calls for “England for the English,” mass deportations, and an end to shame-free multiculturalism.

The Telegraph acts shocked that she also praises her “Anglo-Saxon hair” and rejects the idea she’s being “used” by men.

Of course the usual suspects are wheeled out to clutch pearls. Hope Not Hate researcher Alex MacKinnon calls it a “glamorisation” effort to shed the “violent thug image.” Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s Hannah Rose says looking desirable builds followers and fits the ideology that women should be “aesthetically pleasing.”

The implication is that these women can’t possibly believe what they’re saying – they must be grifting or being manipulated. Because in the eyes of the legacy media, no normal young attractive woman could possibly notice what’s happening to her country.

This is the same media that files stories on “far-right” threat while ignoring grooming gang scandals, no-go zones, and skyrocketing violence against women and girls. The Telegraph even admits the shift comes from young people “profoundly disaffected with mainstream parties” and disillusioned with modern life.

Yet instead of asking why that disillusionment exists, they obsess over Instagram filters and “zhuzhing” the image.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has today claimed he’s all about “championing peaceful protest” while simultaneously blocking entry to those he dislikes. Starmer declared:

“I’ll always champion peaceful protest. But the Unite the Kingdom march organisers are peddling hatred and division,” then admitting that “We’ve already blocked visas for far-right agitators who want to come here to spew their extremist views.”

Keir Starmer@Keir_Starmer

I’ll always champion peaceful protest. But the Unite the Kingdom march organisers are peddling hatred and division.

We’ve already blocked visas for far-right agitators who want to come here to spew their extremist views.

They don’t speak for the decent, fair, respectful Britain

11:55 AM · May 15, 2026 · 9.05M Views

51.7K Replies · 3.33K Reposts · 20.2K Likes

Why are intelligent women who take care over their appearance being maligned as ‘far right’? Well, take at look at this lot:

It’s no wonder they’re rattled. That’s the clownworld alternative the establishment promotes – and it terrifies them that normal, feminine, attractive women are rejecting it in favour of common sense.

This is also the same tired playbook the left has run for years. Remember when the likes of MSNBC insisted health and fitness was the “new gateway drug to the far-right”? Even basic self-improvement triggers the mob. Now being attractive, articulate, and female while opposing open borders gets you labelled “far-right agitator.” Apparently only frumpy, blue-haired nose ring radicals are allowed to have political opinions.

X users were not impressed with the Telegraph writer’s take.

Zee 🔥@Zeeeee_xx

@Telegraph It’s always the ugly jealous unattractive cat ladies that hates attractive women trying to stand up for their country

8:08 AM · May 15, 2026 · 17.5K Views

19 Replies · 34 Reposts · 2.4K Likes

Nate, or, Mr H Reviews@MrHreviews

@Telegraph So, we’re winning.
No longer fringe.
The norm is our way of thinking.
Rattled.

8:00 AM · May 15, 2026 · 2.15K Views

1 Reply · 3 Reposts · 206 Likes

Caldron Pool@CaldronPool

@Telegraph The Leftwing establishment is so accustomed to the freak show they attract that normal, feminine women are an oddity that terrifies them. 😂

6:33 AM · May 15, 2026 · 1.59K Views

2 Replies · 2 Reposts · 101 Likes

Emily Wilding Davison🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿@Wommando

@Telegraph Ah yes, young women couldn’t possibly be concerned about the erasure of their safety, culture and freedom.

What a woeful and pathetic excuse of so-called ‘journalism’.

7:37 AM · May 15, 2026 · 1.47K Views

1 Reply · 11 Reposts · 188 Likes

Ardan@ArdanXXII

@Telegraph The face of the far-right is just the Native Europeans who are sick of the ongoing conquest of our lands by 3rd World Savages, thank god that our women are waking up too & joining us in this fight 💪🏻🤍

6:56 AM · May 15, 2026 · 6.59K Views

4 Replies · 11 Reposts · 479 Likes

The left’s panic is understandable. When healthy, fit, attractive people start rejecting open borders and woke insanity, the narrative collapses. Being patriotic, noticing patterns, and wanting your country to survive is not “far-right.” It’s normal.

The real extremists are the ones importing chaos, silencing dissent, and branding beauty, fitness, and common sense as threats. The more they smear, the more people wake up.

Copyright 2026 m o d e r n i t y

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If the COVID vaccines worked to reduce risk of death, we’d expect that by March 2022, the slope of the cumulative deaths for COVID waves would flatten. So in the graph above, we’d have expected the red line to slope DOWN.

It slopes up.

Looks like the vaccines didn’t work as expected. Whoops.

I computed the slope of the cumulative deaths for each country for each COVID wave and plotted a dot representing the slope (y axis) and the middle of the COVID wave (x axis).

As you can see from the plot above, the slope got worse over time instead of dramatically better.

We can plot the top 25 most vaccinated countries:

We can plot the 25 least vaccinated countries:

Here are some examples of the slope fit algorithm for Czech Republic and US. We did this for every country with COVID death data in OWID.

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In July of 2020, at the height of COVID lockdowns and global panic, Klaus Schwab released a book called COVID-19: The Great Reset.

At the time, many dismissed concerns about the “Great Reset” as “conspiracy theory.”

But the people who actually read the book noticed it openly described a future built where our God-Given freedoms would degrade into “privileges” under the guise of safety.

Vaccine passports were just the beginning of the nightmarish dystopia planned for humanity.

Then something remarkable happened.

Millions of people around the world started pushing back.

After years of lockdowns, mandates, censorship, inflation, and growing distrust in global institutions, people began rejecting the idea that unelected organizations, corporations, and governments should have increasing control over everyday life.

By 2024, many conservatives believed that tide had finally turned. Donald Trump’s victory was seen by supporters as a direct rejection of open-border globalism and the WHO/WEF worldview.

For a moment, it felt like the Great Reset had been stopped in its tracks.

But while much of the public relaxed and assumed the fight was over, the underlying systems never actually stopped expanding.

And that’s exactly what makes the conversation with Tom Renz so unsettling.

Because he’s been paying close attention and says the Great Reset actually didn’t fail.

It’s that people stopped noticing the plan was still moving forward.

He joins us now.

Freedom slipping away rarely looks the way people imagine it will.

That’s one reason this conversation lands so hard. None of it feels theoretical anymore.

You can already see the infrastructure taking shape everywhere. Massive data centers. Expanding surveillance systems. More digital verification tied to everyday life. And according to Tom Renz, people are making a huge mistake by looking at each piece separately instead of asking what all of it becomes once it’s connected together.

“They told us the Great Reset was coming,” Renz said. “Instead of fighting it, we’re ushering it in.”

A lot of these projects get sold to the public through the same language: economic growth, innovation, convenience. But Renz believes the bigger picture becomes harder to ignore once you ask why governments and corporations suddenly need this much infrastructure this quickly.

“What do you need to track and trace everybody on the planet?” he asked. “Well, you need a lot of data centers.”

One frustration running through the interview was watching Republicans advance some of the same systems conservatives spent years warning about under globalist institutions.

“Public private partnership,” he said, “is literally the WEF model of the Great Reset.”

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The unsettling part is that these systems don’t arrive all at once.

They show up slowly, wrapped in language about safety, efficiency, fraud prevention, or national security. A new ID requirement here. A phone verification rule there. Another layer of tracking tied to things people already rely on every day.

Renz warned that once those systems start merging together, privacy becomes almost impossible to recover.

He pointed to Real ID as one example people underestimated for years. What was sold as a security measure now carries biometric implications and ties into broader digital identity systems.

A major contradiction running through the interview was the realization that many voters thought they were electing people who would dismantle this after COVID.

Instead, Renz believes parts of the Republican Party are helping accelerate it.

“The Republican Party is now a joke,” he said.

Renz also warned that constitutional protections can disappear much faster than people think once governments and corporations start working together through digital systems.

Instead of openly violating rights, he argued officials increasingly rely on what he called “legal workarounds” that sidestep protections people assume still exist.

That part lands because people already lived through pieces of it during COVID.

Accounts censored. Jobs lost. Access restricted. Speech controlled.

Renz believes what’s being built now could make that level of control much easier next time.

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What made this information so disturbing is how familiar pieces of it already feel.

Phones track movement. Banks monitor transactions.

Cars collect data. Insurance companies reward or punish behavior.

More and more of daily life now runs through digital systems most people barely think about anymore.

Renz’s concern is what happens once all of those systems stop operating separately.

He warned that technologies tied to vehicles, banking, healthcare, digital identity, and AI are creating a world where access itself becomes conditional.

Something sold as convenience or safety today can turn into something very different once travel, finances, healthcare, and identity all become connected together.

That’s why Renz kept returning to digital track-and-trace infrastructure.

People already experienced smaller versions of this mentality during COVID: jobs threatened, travel restricted, speech monitored, medical decisions tied to participation in public life.

Renz believes the infrastructure being built now could push that much further next time.

He described a future where insurance costs, healthcare access, and financial penalties become tools used to pressure compliance around vaccination status and government-defined “risk.”

By the end of the interview, Renz sounded genuinely concerned that the systems built during COVID were never dismantled, they just became quieter and more normalized.

He argued that many Americans still think Republicans and Democrats are fighting for completely different futures, while the same underlying systems keep expanding no matter who wins elections.

“The dirty secret about election fraud,” Renz said, “is that the Republicans do it as much as the Democrats.”

That frustration carried into the broader feeling that grassroots candidates almost never survive once they threaten establishment power or major donor networks.

You could hear it again when Renz talked about Republicans attacking Thomas Massie while continuing to protect figures conservatives themselves have spent years criticizing.

“If you’re okay with endorsing Lindsey Graham and attacking Thomas Massie,” he said, “you’re like a leftist and a cultist.”

The bigger concern wasn’t really about personalities or party labels anymore.

It was the growing sense that people who once distrusted centralized power now defend it automatically as long as it appears politically useful in the moment.

Renz warned that exhaustion has become part of the problem.

People fought through lockdowns.
They fought through censorship.
They fought through years of nonstop political chaos.

Now many assume somebody else is taking care of it. He doesn’t believe that’s true.

As the interview closed, Renz warned that the infrastructure being built now is designed to become permanent once it’s fully operational, and reversing it later may not be realistic.

“The next lockdowns that occur in this country,” he warned, “are going to be a permanent change.”

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We want to thank Tom Renz for joining us today—and more importantly, we want to thank you for watching and doing your duty to be informed when so many others choose not to.

Follow us (@ZeeeMedia and @VigilantFox) for stories that matter—stories the media doesn’t want you to see. We’ll be back with another show on Friday. See you then.

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My favorite AI, AlterAI, has a few open software development positions.

If you know of someone who is super talented and wants to help change the world for the better, this is the place to be.

We are now turning years of founder conviction into a focused affiliate-led growth push—creating a rare opportunity for early contributors to join before the next inflection point and earn equity.

We’re looking for a small number of exceptional engineers to help build AI-native products at AlterAI.

This is a very small, highly technical team moving fast.

Stack:

• Svelte 5 / SvelteKit 2

• Bun / Node.js

• Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects

• Supabase / Postgres

• AI agents, tool orchestration, persistence, and recovery

You should be comfortable:

• owning systems end-to-end

• shipping quickly with minimal process

• making strong architectural decisions

• debugging difficult production issues

• working across frontend/backend/infrastructure

• using AI tools heavily in development

These are also desirable:

We value engineering taste, speed, ownership, and the ability to simplify complex systems.

If you’ve built impressive things, send links/GitHub/projects.

This article originally appeared on the Daily Caller News Foundation and was republished with permission.

Guest post by John Oyewale

A video has surfaced online of a mobile billboard being driven around Los Angeles appearing to taunt Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass over her January trip to Ghana while the city was on the cusp of wind-driven wildfires.

The video advertisement, as displayed on the roving jumbotron, is a montage of animated illustrations, with one showing a likeness of Bass shopping for printed fabric sandwiched between that of firefighters agonizing over a failed fire hydrant as wildfires rage in the background. Another shows someone fleeing through a neighborhood under the imminent threat of wildfires.

It also shows the likeness of Bass taking photographs in an area with a landmark draped in the colors of the flag of Ghana before cutting to a scene showing the same likeness giving a speech against a backdrop emblazoned with the words “LAX Plane Train—Ready for the World Cup 2026.”

A likeness of Republican LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt is seen holding what appears to be a broomstick. The likeness of Pratt is later seen pushing a dumpster containing the image of Bass through a crowd-lined street, with a heading in Spanish that appears to pun on Bass’s last name and could be translated as “Spencer takes out the trash.”

Bass traveled to Ghana on Jan. 4, 2025 to attend the inauguration of reelected Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama, a day after the National Weather Service issued a fire weather and high wind advisory for much of LA and Ventura counties. The weather warnings escalated several times before Bass shared her first statement, which contained information that was a few hours outdated, CBS News reported.

The Palisades Fire broke out a few hours after the inauguration ceremony, and Bass appeared in photographs at a U.S. embassy Ghana cocktail party reception when the fire had burned for about an hour and a half, the outlet reported, citing The LA Times.

Bass returned to LA on Jan. 8, by which time about 1,000 structures had burned and over 70,000 Angelenos were under evacuation orders, according to CBS News.

Bass later told CBS News that, in retrospect, she would not have traveled abroad at the time. The trip signaled her fourth breach of her pre-mayoralty promise made in an October 2021 interview with the New York Times that she would not travel abroad if elected mayor.

Bass appears to be leading the five-person race for her position, while Pratt has evolved as her main rival, results of an Emerson College Polling/Inside California Politics survey released Wednesday showed.

Copyright 2026 Daily Caller News Foundation

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This article originally appeared on ZeroHedge and was republished with permission.

Guest post by Tyler Durden

A millennial used Anthropic’s Claude to crack the password to his Bitcoin wallet after locking himself out for more than 11 years.

Back in 2014, the X user “cprkrn,” who did not identify himself, explained that he had a crypto wallet on an old computer, got stoned one night, changed the password, and forgot it. He tried trillions of password guesses over the years with no luck.

“I tried like 7 trillion passwords lmfao. Found this old pneumonic a few weeks ago that ended up being the old password before I changed it. Thought I was screwed. Last-ditch effort dumped my whole college computer into Claude,” cprkrn said.

He noted, “It found an OLD wallet file that the pneumonic successfully decrypted. Locked out 11+ years because I got stoned and changed the password.”

The password turned out to be: lol420fuckthePOLICE!* …

🍜@cprkrn

@AnthropicAI Best part is the password was:

lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

4:39 PM · May 13, 2026 · 532K Views

179 Replies · 213 Reposts · 7.37K Likes

Here are the prompts in Claude that helped the man retrieve five lost Bitcoins…

And here is proof: the wallet went active on Wednesday after being dormant for a decade.

He added:

🍜@cprkrn

@AnthropicAI Last tweet + muting, asked Claude to summarize our recovery efforts:

TLDR, tried ~3.5 trillion passwords + none worked, ended up matching an old seed phrase found in a college notebook with an old wallet file 🙂

7:16 PM · May 13, 2026 · 403K Views

52 Replies · 52 Reposts · 2.39K Likes

It was on Wednesday when we cited UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri, who provided color on what corporate America thinks about the chatbot race: “The survey continues to point to Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia as the key enterprise AI winners, but with Anthropic gaining ground.”

Read that report here.

Copyright 2026 ZeroHedge

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