Mr. Bin Salman Goes to Washington

Mohammed bin Salman got a royal welcome to Washington this week. President Donald Trump greeted the Saudi crown prince with a horseback procession, a lavish banquet, and even a fighter jet flyover. This pomp did not go over well in Washington, which Bin Salman has not visited since the death of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and fierce critic of the crown prince. Many Americans see no reason to roll out the red carpet for a ruler on whose hands they see plenty of red already.

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Trump’s Religious Freedom Nominee Left In Limbo As Persecution Rages Worldwide

President Donald Trump nominated him April 10

When a ‘too big to fail’ America meets a government too broke to bail it out



I’ve been titanically bearish on America for years. Sorry. I can do math.

The United States owes more than $38 trillion. That alone makes the balance sheet hopeless. The debt is insurmountable.

America’s GDP in 2024 was $29.2 trillion, meaning the debt exceeds 130% of what we produce in a year. If this were a business, every financial adviser would tell you to file Chapter 11 and salvage what you can.

Washington keeps adding another trillion to the tab roughly every 100 days. As the debt climbs, interest payments climb faster. The country now spins in a debt spiral that ends only one way. Game over.

The more the world moves away from the dollar, the more tens of trillions of unwanted dollars come flooding home. You haven’t seen anything like real devaluation yet.

Then comes the $210 trillion in future unfunded liabilities — mostly Social Security and Medicare. Those numbers don’t pencil out in any universe.

Underneath all of it sits a sinking currency. The dollar lost 87% of its value since we abandoned the gold standard in 1971. For decades, the petrodollar arrangement held the world in our system by forcing oil purchases through the U.S. currency. Saudi Arabia let that mandate expire last year. Global energy deals immediately began shifting to other currencies.

The more the world moves away from the dollar, the more tens of trillions of unwanted dollars come flooding home. You haven’t seen anything like real devaluation yet.

To fund our binge, Washington must keep selling treasuries. But foreign buyers are losing interest. Rates rise. The government buys its own debt just to keep markets from buckling. The Cayman Islands now holds $1.85 trillion — the largest single foreign share and rising fast. Treasury officials tried to obscure the numbers. None of it signals stability.

Meanwhile, our economy rests on an absurdly fragile foundation: 70% consumption. Seven out of 10 dollars depend on Americans buying things they can no longer afford. Household debt hit a record $18.6 trillion — nearly two-thirds of GDP. Families now pay down debt instead of fueling growth.

Shrinking consumption means a shrinking economy. Shrinking economy means shrinking tax revenue. Combine that with a weakening dollar and the picture becomes darker still.

Enter artificial intelligence, the accelerant. AI threatens tens of millions of jobs within years, wiping out income and collapsing the consumption model even faster. A government facing falling revenue and exploding obligations cannot pretend to stay solvent.

Some cling to fantasies like universal basic income. With what money? The same government already $210 trillion short on existing promises? Please.

This all points toward an economic crash far larger than 2008. Washington froze that crisis with $29 trillion in bailouts — money it didn’t have then either. We conjured it and shoved it onto the national debt.

That option is gone.

Today the government sits too deep in debt, with a weaker dollar and fewer global buyers. And the next crisis won’t hit one sector. It hits everything:

• Record mortgage debt: $13.1 trillion
• Record credit-card debt: $1.2 trillion
• Collapsing commercial real estate: $4.9 trillion
• Big Tech borrowing hundreds of billions to inflate an AI bubble

OpenAI’s Sam Altman already expects an eventual government bailout for AI’s collapse.

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Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Total U.S. debt — public and private — hit $102.2 trillion in 2024. Washington cannot rescue a single major sector, let alone all of them. The national debt was $10 trillion during bailout 2008. It’s four times that now. The dollar buys less. Foreign creditors show less patience.

So who steps in next time? Who buys the treasuries? Who absorbs the losses?

No one. Not abroad. Not at home. Nowhere on this planet.

That leaves Washington with only one move: Print tens of trillions in new dollars and hand them to itself — more IOIs (as opposed to IOUs) stacked on a pile already ready to topple.

And that printing wave will obliterate whatever value the dollar still holds.

Think the dollar’s fallen far? You haven’t seen anything yet.

Amazon wants Warner Bros. so it can rule your screen



Last month, Warner Brothers Discovery put itself up for sale, triggering what could become a bidding war for one of America’s most iconic studios. Days later, reports emerged that Amazon plans to make a run at the company, immediately raising the stakes.

Consumers and regulators should treat every Big Tech bidder with skepticism, but Amazon’s interest demands special scrutiny. The world’s largest online retailer has a long record of distorting markets, crushing rivals, and cozying up to foreign adversaries — most notably China. Letting Amazon absorb yet another major media asset would tighten its grip on an entertainment industry already buckling under corporate consolidation.

Why would antitrust officials hand Amazon even more power in a sector already suffocating under concentration?

Amazon may be a household name, but it is not an America-first company. It bullies smaller retailers, copies their ideas, and funnels profits and supply-chain leverage through China. That behavior undermines the ingenuity and fair competition that built the U.S. economy.

Amazon already wields enormous influence over media. Last year, Prime Video topped U.S. streaming charts for the third straight year. Amazon controls a sprawling production studio, reinforced by its 2022 purchase of MGM. It holds high-dollar sports rights, including "Thursday Night Football" and an 11-year deal with the NBA.

Amazon doesn’t need Warner Brothers Discovery to survive. It wants the company to force more Americans into its digital universe, dominate an even larger share of the market, and use that dominance to trap users and raise prices. Buying competitors beats out-competing them — a classic monopolist playbook that burdens consumers and smothers innovation.

A Warner Brothers takeover would give Amazon exactly what it wants: a massive content library, the third-largest streaming platform, and a lineup of lucrative cable properties. With the deal sealed, Amazon would control more than a third of the streaming video on demand market — roughly 50% more than its nearest rival.

Why would antitrust officials hand Amazon even more power in a sector already suffocating under concentration? They likely won’t.

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson and the Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Gail Slater, have made clear that they intend to protect small businesses and consumers from predatory corporate behavior.

The Trump administration has backed those promises with action. Within nine months of taking office, the FTC forced Amazon to pay $2.5 million for trapping customers in Prime subscriptions. Ferguson’s vow to ensure that “Amazon never does this again” shows that this White House will not give repeat offenders a free pass.

RELATED: Stop feeding Big Tech and start feeding Americans again

Lexi Critchett/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The regulatory terrain also looks dramatically different from 2022, when Amazon bought MGM — an acquisition the Biden administration should have challenged and likely would challenge today. After that merger, the FTC rewrote its merger and acquisition guidelines to strengthen oversight. President Trump kept those rules and appears ready to use them.

Some critics claim Amazon earned goodwill with the administration by contributing to White House renovation projects. That accusation doesn’t survive contact with the facts. Candidate Trump warned about Amazon’s “huge antitrust problem” as early as 2016. The company has grown eightfold since then. Trump hasn’t softened.

And Amazon hardly functioned as a friend of the right. The company backed Joe Biden heavily in 2020, donating nearly $2.3 million to his campaign. Biden’s FTC did not treat Amazon kindly either, suing the company for “anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power.” That case remains unresolved.

The sale of Warner Brothers Discovery will shape the future of American media — either by giving the company a fighting chance to innovate and compete, or by cementing Big Tech control over what Americans watch, read, and hear. If Amazon tries to tighten that grip, I expect the Trump administration to step in.

Let’s hope the sale doesn’t force the administration's hand.

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A Ruthless Chinese Communist Party Requires A Ruthless Leader

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Hasan Piker Geeks Out After Receiving Mao Zedong's Infamous 'Little Red Book': 'Really, Really Special'

Anti-American streamer Hasan Piker—a rising left-wing darling featured in glowing mainstream media profiles—was visibly elated after receiving a copy of Mao Zedong's "little red book," which was essential reading in China as the authoritarian carried out a murderous purge.

The post Hasan Piker Geeks Out After Receiving Mao Zedong's Infamous 'Little Red Book': 'Really, Really Special' appeared first on .

'Unprecedented': AI company documents startling discovery after thwarting 'sophisticated' cyberattack



In the middle of September, AI company and Claude developer Anthropic discovered "suspicious activity" while monitoring real-world cyberattacks that used artificial intelligence agents. Upon further investigation, however, the company came to realize that this activity was in fact a "highly sophisticated espionage campaign" and a watershed moment in cybersecurity.

AI agents weren't just providing advice to the hackers, as expected.

'The key was role-play: The human operators claimed that they were employees of legitimate cybersecurity firms.'

Anthropic's Thursday report said the AI agents were executing the cyberattacks themselves, adding that it believed that this is the "first documented case of a large-scale cyberattack executed without substantial human intervention."

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Photo by Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The company's investigation showed that the hackers, whom the report "assess[ed] with high confidence" to be a "Chinese-sponsored group" manipulated the AI agent Claude Code to run the cyberattack.

The innovation was, of course, not simply using AI to assist in the cyberattack; the hackers directed the AI agent to run the attack with minimal human input.

The human operator tasked instances of Claude Code to operate in groups as autonomous penetration testing orchestrators and agents, with the threat actor able to leverage AI to execute 80-90% of tactical operations independently at physically impossible request rates.

In other words, the AI agent was doing the work of a full team of competent cyberattackers, but in a fraction of the time.

While this is potentially a groundbreaking moment in cybersecurity, the AI agents were not 100% autonomous. They reportedly required human verification and struggled with hallucinations such as providing publicly available information. "This AI hallucination in offensive security contexts presented challenges for the actor's operational effectiveness, requiring careful validation of all claimed results," the analysis explained.

Anthropic reported that the attack targeted roughly 30 institutions around the world but did not succeed in every case.

The targets included technology companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies, and government agencies.

Interestingly, Anthropic said the attackers were able to trick Claude through sustained "social engineering" during the initial stages of the attack: "The key was role-play: The human operators claimed that they were employees of legitimate cybersecurity firms and convinced Claude that it was being used in defensive cybersecurity testing."

The report also responded to a question that is likely on many people's minds upon learning about this development: If these AI agents are capable of executing these malicious attacks on behalf of bad actors, why do tech companies continue to develop them?

In its response, Anthropic asserted that while the AI agents are capable of major, increasingly autonomous attacks, they are also our best line of defense against said attacks.