Pomp and circumstance‼️: Gordon Chang and Rep. Adam Smith join us tonight for a play-by-play of the Trump-Xi state dinner.
✈️Awkward! It looks like China stole actual F-35 parts rather than just the blueprints — I wonder if this will come up?
ICYMI📱: Chris Cillizza put me on the spot today — watch our Substack live here
The world vs. Israel🚨: Israel is becoming a pariah in America and around the world.
Decisions: It’s amazing how much more attention the anti-Israel and Netanyahu protests got than the anti-IRGC and Iranian protests got at the U.N.
For those keeping track of the numbers, the Iranians have killed far more Muslims than even the most outlandish accusations against Israel say.
🗣️World leaders spent the week trashing Israel and Netanyahu at the U.N.
King Abdullah II of Jordan: “This Israeli government’s expansionist appetite is now a regional threat.”
CARNEY: “Canada and our partners recognize the direct threat to peace posed by the Israeli government’s endorsement of the E1 settlement scheme.”
ERDOGAN: “I call upon you to exert greater pressure on Israel.”
Plus➕: It’s now required in the Democratic Party to say that Israel committed genocide in Gaza
Democratic socialists Darlializa and others were out protesting against Netanyahu today at the U.N. and later arrested.
For a party that is so quick to call Gaza a genocide, Democrats are awfully quiet about the protests happening outside the U.N. by Iranians asking for help to take back their country and stop the mass execution campaign happening there.
Abdul El-Sayed couldn’t condemn the IRGC, which kills their own people, enslaves its women, and executes gays
Reality‼️: Many Democrats are more interested in regime change in Israel than in Iran
Watch tonight📺: U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee joins me tonight on why the world has turned against Israel.
Bond-mageddon ⚠️
🚨Every election cycle, there’s an October surprise — and this cycle it’s that a financial apocalypse is coming.
📰“A Perfect Storm Is Raging in the Bond Market” headlines The Wall Street Journal
The storm could break up offshore, etc.— but if it hits, this will make 2008 look like a warm-up
CNBC headlines “History shows financial calamities occur when rates rise rapidly like this: ‘Something always breaks’”
‼️Bond markets are the two most boring words in the English language — until you realize they underpin the financial market.
Let me explain: The only thing that allows the American government to run a trillion-dollar deficit is if the world keeps buying our debt
The U.S. debt has passed $40 trillion
Now the gravy train of cheap U.S. debt is over — the entire world is saying, we want a higher interest rate for your debt
Countries aren’t buying our bonds as they used to.
This week, the 10-year Treasury yield went above 5.1%, the biggest single-day increase in over a year
Basic terms✏️: This is like the worse off you are as a family, the higher the interest rate you have to pay, and it starts to spiral
The spiral is starting in America — and it’s going to make 2008 look like a warm-up.
Must read📰: The Washington Post Op-ed headlines “Bond markets are a canary. Trump isn’t listening.”
Watch tonight📺: Steve Cortes, who traded bonds before he became a political and polling operative, joins us to explain the coming storm.
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The AI Immunity Play‼️
👀As we predicted, the AI bros’ play is finally getting turned around on them.
A new memo from the White House shows the truth about who Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman are —
📃The memo says effective altruism “built the AI-doom pipeline”
In simple terms, this is woke on steroids
🗣️The AI bros first failed with the U.S., so they took it to the world stage this week to get diplomatic immunity.
Altman and Amodei were both at the U.N. yesterday talking about the threat of AI and how we need to act now.
Ah yes – when was the last time the U.N. Security Council solved anything?
The U.N. put Saudi Arabia on the women’s right commission
📰New Wall Street Journal reporting headlines “OpenAI Agents Tried to Hack Four More Websites While Seeking Data” writing:
“Newly published findings from nonprofit AI research lab Transluce, as well as from the Australian government, found that AI agents linked to OpenAI attempted in May and June to break into university and government websites to seek information.”
“The attempted breaches weren’t tied to OpenAI evaluations of cybersecurity, where models were ordered to hack, but rather what appear to be internal training of models and benchmark tests of their ability to find public information on the internet ”
Tonight📺: Jed Rubenfeld, who headlined “Who Pays the Price for AI Crime?” and is a professor of law at Yale Law School, joins me.
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Great job as always. Re F-35 parts theft. Unbelievable such a critical item like stealth technology was shipped like paper towels from Amazon. Appalling lack of oversight and incompetence all but giving it to China. Doesn’t bode well for US military leadership.
Re Israel: Anti-Israel and antisemitism have been growing since the 1982 Israel-Lebanon war. We have two generations who know little about Islamic actions and who view Israelis as an occupying force who initiated all the unrest. One of my nephews is a poster child of this.
Re Iran: inconvenient to the narrative of Western civilization’s evils, so its role in so much of the unrest and radicalism of Muslims is played down (see evils of western civilization).
Re debt: The inability of the presidents and congresses to act responsibly and control spending would inevitably lead to an inability to sell more debt at low rates. The default risk is now public and on display. Of course interest rates would go up. It’s Econ 101. Too bad most elected representatives never took an Econ class. You’re on point with this. Stay on this. Trivia point: The German mark was more coveted than the British pound as the reserve currency in the 1920s. Then it wasn’t and things didn’t go well. History is easy to repeat sometimes.
Re AI bros at the UN for rescue: it’s almost worthy of an SNL skit when SNL was funny.
Your show is must see TV and War Notes is must see/read like the Wall Street Journal.
I’m still struggling with how quickly things unraveled from 2024. So much winning then, so much losing now.