First $1 Billion, Now $50 Million: Khanna Says Wealth Tax "Must Not Stop At Billionaires"
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) - fresh off endorsing California's November ballot measure to seize 5% of billionaire wealth - published a Substack essay Wednesday titled, no really, "Why I Support a Billionaire Wealth Tax."
He makes it roughly a dozen paragraphs before explaining that it isn't one.
"The tax should not stop at billionaires, it must reach centimillionaires," Khanna writes, before spelling out exactly what that means: every fortune of $50 million and up, hit with a 2% federal levy on wealth above that line - every year, forever, on top of everything else you already pay. The vehicle is Elizabeth Warren's Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, which Khanna notes he has cosponsored every single year it's been introduced.
And before anyone reaches for the estate planner: Khanna wants the levy to pierce irrevocable trusts, with the tax billed to the grantor who set them up - because parking a fortune in a trust, in his telling, shouldn't take it off the government's books.
Former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky summed up the reveal in eight words: "Just like that, no longer a billionaires tax."
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/first-1-billion-now-50-million-khanna-says-wealth-tax-must-not-stop-billionaires
Russia repels major Ukrainian long-range attack – MOD
Over 500 targets, including cruise missiles, were downed overnight by Russian anti-aircraft defenses
Russian forces have repelled a Ukrainian long-range combined drone and missile attack, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has said.
During the assault, anti-aircraft defenses downed over 500 targets, mainly long-range kamikaze drones, the ministry said in a statement on Saturday. It added that the military destroyed 10 FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles and at least nine munitions fired by US-made HIMARS systems.
The ministry described the attack as a foiled attempt by Kiev to divert the attention of its Western sponsors and common Ukrainians from large-scale Russian strikes earlier this week, as well as from the loss of Konstantinovka, a major city in northwestern Donbass.
Moscow announced the liberation of the city on Friday following weeks of intensive combat in the area. Konstantinovka is located at the southernmost tip of the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration, a string of cities in the northwest of Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). The agglomeration has been turned into a fortress by Kiev’s forces and remains the last major stronghold under Ukrainian control in the region. The city itself is located some 15 km southeast of Kramatorsk, with the small town of Druzhkovka lying in between.
The Russian long-range attack mentioned by the ministry occurred on Thursday night and was primarily focused on the Ukrainian capital. The authorities in Kiev described it as the largest-scale strike on the city since the conflict escalated in 2022. The targets listed by the Russian Defense Ministry included multiple plants producing missiles and drones, facilities manufacturing electronic warfare implements and components of other military hardware, a large fuel depot, and several gas facilities used to supply power to defense industry sites.
In June alone, the Russian anti-aircraft defenses intercepted around 13,000 incoming aerial targets over the country’s territory, the ministry said. “The production and launch support for these targets was handled by military departments and specialists from most European countries, including the UK, as well as other sponsors of the Kiev regime,” the ministry said, warning that any further attempts by Kiev to harm the Russian civilians will continue to invoke “appropriate retaliatory actions” by the country’s military.
https://www.rt.com/russia/642581-ukraine-long-range-attack/
Entering Day 20 of Senator Mitch McConnell’s hospitalization following his June 14, 2026, medical emergency, with questions about who is running his office… questions that have intensified after his wife, Elaine Chao, traveled to Beijing & met with Chinese Vice President Han Zheng just days after McConnell’s hospitalization.
https://twitter.com/i/status/2073207768719216956
Israel Reportedly Attempted To Shoot Down Iran’s Negotiators
Israel attempted to kill Iran’s negotiators on their plane after talks between the U.S. and Iran concluded in Pakistan, The New York Times reported.
The attempt occurred in the air as Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf were flying home to Tehran from talks in Pakistan, the outlet reported, citing anonymous U.S. officials. As the officials were en route flying home, Iran’s security forces notified the plane that two Israeli fighter jets had entered Iranian airspace with the intention of attacking it.
However, the plane was not shot down as it made an emergency landing in Mashhad, Iran’s closest airport to Pakistan, according to the Times. The diplomatic jet also had an escort from Pakistani fighter jets.
The Iranian diplomatic jet was carrying more than 70 other Iranian officials during the flight, the outlet reported.
The White House, the State Department and the Israeli Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
https://dailycaller.com/2026/07/02/israel-reportedly-attempted-shoot-down-iran-negotiators/
SELF-DEFENSE AGAINST THE MACHINE: Virginia Man Puts Warrantless Flock Surveillance on Trial
A Virginia man accused of destroying multiple flock cameras, who pleads not guilty because mass surveillance violates our rights.
As millions of Americans passively consume state-sanctioned fireworks this Fourth of July, it is crucial to remember that Independence Day was not birthed from compliance, but from radical, unapologetic defiance against a monolithic empire. That raw spirit of 1776 has not been extinguished; it has simply shifted targets from a tyrant king to the digital panopticon. The surveillance state rarely takes kindly to those who blind its all-seeing eye, and the latest casualty in this modern war for liberty is a 41-year-old Suffolk, Virginia resident named Jeffrey Scott Sovern. Between April and October of 2025, local authorities allege Sovern channeled that revolutionary energy by systematically dismantling 13 Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras operated by the private surveillance behemoth Flock Safety.
Investigators claim Sovern separated the two-piece mounting poles and removed the tracking equipment with tools, targeting the $1,300 setups that include the camera, solar panel, and mounting hardware. For allegedly blinding the panopticon, Sovern now faces 13 counts of felony destruction of property, six counts of petit larceny, and six counts of possessing burglary tools.
The official narrative, conveniently laid out in a criminal complaint, asserts that after Sovern was arrested on October 17, 2025, on unrelated warrants, he outright confessed to disassembling the units. Police claim he admitted to keeping solar panels, batteries, and other hardware at his Nicklaus Drive residence, which culminated in a raid that allegedly recovered six of those stolen solar panels.
Unsurprisingly, a spokesperson for Flock Safety issued a statement expressing gratitude toward law enforcement for holding individuals accountable when their devices are damaged. Yet, this corporate applause completely ignores the glaring constitutional crisis created by the very existence of these devices on public roadways.
These ALPR networks act as an unconstitutional dragnet, indiscriminately logging the movements of innocent, peaceful individuals without a shred of probable cause. In fact, just a year prior in June 2024, a Circuit Court judge in neighboring Norfolk correctly ruled that collecting location data from the city's 172 Flock cameras constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment, accurately likening the vast database to warrantless tracking devices.
The state’s portrayal of a clean, by-the-book investigation is already facing heavy public scrutiny. Individuals claiming to have been inside Sovern’s residence during the raid publicly asserted that police stormed the home, forced a resident to cower in a towel, and threatened everyone with handcuffs while refusing to immediately produce a warrant.
While disabling a device that is actively executing an unconstitutional search on your person might seem like a righteous defense of liberty, bringing that dismantled hardware into your home is a fatal tactical error. By allegedly harvesting the state-contracted property for personal use, Sovern crossed the threshold into petit larceny, handing the monopoly on violence the exact legal pretext it needed to execute a traumatic raid and levy multiple felonies.
To enforce the protection of their massive surveillance grid, the state didn't hesitate to escalate its own aggression against a citizen. Investigators openly admitted in the criminal complaint that they obtained a search warrant for a GPS tracker, slapping it onto Sovern's vehicle prior to his arrest to secretly monitor his movements and place him near the scenes of the disabled cameras.
This localized battle in Virginia is just a microcosm of the staggering corporate-state panopticon expanding across the country. According to a 2025 review by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, there were roughly 12 million searches conducted across approximately 3,900 law enforcement agencies using these very systems.
https://thefreethoughtproject.com/solutions/self-defense-against-the-machine-virginia-man-puts-warrantless-flock-surveillance-on-trial
Long-warned about global depopulation scheme now lurching into overdrive
Wars, famine and the mass poisoning of humanity facilitated by corrupt public-private partnerships is going to trigger a mass die off not seen since World War II.
I have been warning for years that wars, vaccines, the corruption of our food chain and engineered famine were being managed by globalist technocratic elites for the purpose of depopulation.
I’ve cited arch technocrats like Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates to show that the motive is clear: they want far fewer people on the planet. They are Malthusian in their belief that the earth’s resources are finite and must be strategically redirected away from the masses in such a way that results in a much smaller population.
Not only are they worried about scarce resources, but with the rise of artificial intelligence invading one industry after another, the need for worker bees is plummeting at an accelerated rate.
The Georgia Guidestones monument, erected in rural north Georgia in 1980, also highlighted the global depopulation agenda before they were mysteriously destroyed on July 6, 2022. Law enforcement never fully investigated the attack, who fomented it and why, as the crime scene was quickly bulldozed within hours, removing all evidence. It was interesting to me that the Guidestones, with their incriminating globalist agenda for a vastly smaller global population spelled out in unmistakable terms, were destroyed just as people were waking up to the mass psyop known as Covid 19.
Depopulation is the key to understanding everything going on in the world today at the geopolitical level. This trend is facilitated not only by endless wars but through engineered famine. It’s a historical fact that wars are almost always followed by famine and you can see that trend taking shape in the world today.
But it’s not only through wars that the Malthusians will cull the herd.
Christian Westbrook, author of The Unshadowed blog posted an article earlier this week on President Trump’s June 25 executive order mandating “Regenerative Farming.” The EO gives lip service to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, while proceeding to undermine it with the U.N. climate emphasis on biofuels and carbon credits.
The executive order mentions MAHA, yet the flagship action taken the same day by the USDA, the Regenerative Feedstock Rule, funnels those “regenerative” results explicitly into biofuels.
From the USDA’s own press release:
“The Regenerative Feedstock Rule establishes a framework to connect regenerative agriculture practices to new markets within the biofuel supply chain for corn, soybeans, sorghum, and spring canola.”
Westbrook notes that farmers using prescribed methods are rewarded with lower “carbon intensity scores” via the FD-CIC calculator to chase 45Z tax credits.
He writes: “This is carbon-market infrastructure wearing a regenerative mask, not a program to grow healthier food for American tables.”
He cites language in Trump’s EO that reflects the United Nations/Word Economic Forum globalist agenda, with the admonition to “Watch what they do, not what they say… And what they are doing is taking over food production while screaming about a food crisis, and giving lip service to climate resilience and soil health.”
This executive order combined with the recent Supreme Court ruling that legitimized legal protection for Bayer/Monsanto’s use of Roundup on food crops will have a catastrophic effect on human health.
On that very same day that Trump issued his executive order, “the Supreme Court handed Bayer/Monsanto a major win, deciding that EPA labels preempt state failure-to-warn lawsuits.”
https://leohohmann.substack.com/p/long-warned-about-global-depopulation
Over 746K homes across US without electricity/ AC as widespread heatwave taxes power grids
Temperatures in New York City are forecast to reach 101 degrees and 104 in Washington, D.C., central to the country's July 4 and 250 birthday celebrations.
As many as 746,000 homes in the United States on Saturday are without electricity – including air conditioning – as a heatwave withers much of the country's Midwest, East Coast and South.
The outage number is from the website PowerOutage.com, which also cites extreme weather, which would include lightning storms, for lost power.
Temperatures in New York City are forecast to reach 101 degrees and 104 in Washington, D.C., central to the country's July 4 and 250 birthday celebrations.
The country's mid-Atlantic region has been under triple-digit temperatures for three consecutive days now, with forecasted storms Saturday night not expected to significantly lower temperatures until at least Monday, when 80-degree temperatures are expected.
In Philadelphia, the Salute to Independence Semiquincentennial Parade set for Friday was canceled due to the dangerous heat wave, according to ABC News. And the 250th anniversary celebration on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was suspended Saturday for a few hours because of the extreme heat.
https://justthenews.com/government/local/over-746k-homes-across-us-without-electricity-ac-widespread-heatwave-taxes-power
The oligarchs’ primary front organisation are national governments
A functional oligarchy is where economic elites and organised business groups have significant influence on government policy, while average citizens have little to no independent influence.
As Iain Davis explains, many countries, whether they are capitalist or communist, are now “governed” by a functional oligarchy, the same oligarchy. This is the One World Government.
Oligarchy is a very old system of governance and one we have never really escaped. More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle stated that oligarchy (oligarchia) becomes the governance system “when men of property have government in their hands.” Today, we define “oligarchy” as “government by the few, especially despotic power exercised by a small and privileged group for corrupt or selfish purposes.” When oligarchs exercise political power by virtue of their wealth, we call it “plutocracy.”
A branch of political science called “Elite Theory” has tried to justify the plutocracy of contemporary oligarchs. Generally, however, both plutocracy and oligarchy are considered pejorative terms.
We are told that we live in “representative democracies” precisely because oligarchy is widely viewed as unacceptable. Despite the fact that “representative democracy” is the antithesis of democracy, the purported virtues of our fake democracies are constantly extolled simply to convince us that we don’t live in oligarchies. Political science, though, clearly reveals that we do.
In 2014, political scientists Professor Martin Gilens and Professor Benjamin I. Page conducted a multivariant analysis of nearly 1,800 policy decisions made by the US government over a more than thirty-year period. Their objective was to understand: Who governs? Who really rules? To what extent is the broad body of US citizens sovereign, semi-sovereign, or largely powerless?
The pair considered different theoretical models of democratic governance to assess which most accurately explained the US policymaking process over the studied period. The models Gilens and Page examined were the following:
Majoritarian electoral democracy: policymakers respond to the electoral will of the majority.
Majoritarian pluralism: policy is shaped by the competing influence of interest groups.
Economic-elite domination: policies are made in the interests of the wealthiest in society.
Biased pluralism: majoritarian pluralism is corrupted by the wealth, power, and influence of the economic-elite.
Gilens and Page concluded:
Economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
In 2025, re-evaluating the work of Gilens and Page, two Harvard academics, Professors Archon Fung and Lawrence Lessig, noted that Gilens and Page’s multivariant analysis was “one of the most important studies you’ve probably never heard of.” Fung and Lessig acknowledged that Gilens and Page had demonstrated that the US is not a democracy but is actually a functional oligarchy.
Further research has subsequently demonstrated this to be the case. For example, when In Song Kim, associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (“MIT”), and Helen V. Milner, professor of public affairs at Princeton University, looked at how US foreign policy was formed between 1999 and 2019, they found:
[T]he direction of US foreign economic policy in the past decades suggests [multinational corporations (MNCs)] have been very powerful. The lowering of trade barriers via the GATT/WTO and various preferential trade agreements, the opening of capital markets and signing of bilateral investment treaties and economic agreements with investment protections, and the harmonisation of regulations in many areas in preferential trade agreements are all policies that the US government has pursued actively and ones that MNCs have championed. MNC preferences [. . .] seem to be very congruent with much of recent American foreign economic policy.
More
https://expose-news.com/2026/07/04/the-oligarchs-primary-front-organisation/
Meta data center water discharges suspended after contaminating the city's reclamation water supply with bacterium — system offline for months for cleaning, closed-loop cooling system purge spread rare metal-resistant bacteria in Cheyenne’s water system
The Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities has stopped accepting industrial wastewater from data center fill-and-flush and closed-loop cooling operations after tracing a rare bacterium in the city's reclaimed water to Goat Systems LLC, the entity Meta uses to build its Cheyenne campus. In a notice reported by Cowboy State Daily, the Board said Goat Systems was in significant noncompliance for discharging water carrying Cupriavidus gilardii, a metal-resistant bacterium that interfered with two water reclamation plants and pushed the reuse system offline for months of cleanup. The Board revoked the contractor's fill-and-flush discharge privileges on March 24, and a wider suspension now covers every data center connected to city services.
Fill-and-flush is a commissioning step in which crews fill a cooling loop's piping with water, flush it to clear debris before the system is run, and then send the used water to drain. Goat Systems routed that flush water, which contained Cupriavidus gilardii, into Cheyenne's sanitary sewer, Frank Strong, the Board's engineering and water resource division manager, told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. Strong said the fill water had been purchased from the Board itself and that the origin of the bacterium remains unknown, but said that lab staff caught it in February during routine fecal-bacteria sampling. "This isn't something we normally test for," Strong told the paper.
Microsoft and Nvidia market sealed liquid loops as a near-zero-water alternative to evaporative cooling, an approach that is spreading quickly as AI data centers expand into more communities. Microsoft describes cooling systems that are filled once during construction and then recirculate the same water, while Nvidia's Rubin platform runs a coolant that is 75% water and 25% propylene glycol. That one-time fill, however, is the step that produces a discharge, and the flush water leaves the site before the loop is sealed.
Strong went on to add that the Board's concern extends past the finding of the bacterium, because closed-loop systems can carry glycol and other chemicals that municipal treatment plants aren't built to process. Cheyenne sprays its reclaimed water on parks, golf courses, and other green spaces, and the Board worried the bacterium could become an aerosol hazard during irrigation. Cupriavidus gilardii isn't a regulated contaminant, yet the discharge disrupted treatment sufficiently to trigger pass-through and interference findings under the Cheyenne City Code and federal pretreatment rules.
Meta said that it's supporting its general contractor, Fortis, which stopped discharging and began hauling wastewater offsite, and that independent testing found no trace of the substance. Testing at the Dry Creek and Crow Creek facilities cleared in late June, and the reuse system is back online. Cheyenne City Councilman Pete Laybourn called the disclosure "a very, very unpleasant surprise." The Board hasn't said how the suspension affects other Cheyenne data centers still under construction.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/cheyenne-suspends-data-center-fill-and-flush-and-closed-loop-discharges-after-meta-contractor-contaminated-its-reuse-water-system
Ben Shapiro special on our Founding Fathers argues that Thomas Jefferson would have supported the war on Iran.
https://x.com/infolibnews/status/2073223993251832301
🚨 BOMBSHELL! Prominent journalist Ben Swann exposes leaked footage of Israeli officials explicitly ordering the Hannibal Directive on October 7th.
They are caught on camera demanding the military bomb the border and kill their own abducted soldiers!
They trying to hide this.
https://twitter.com/i/status/2073188530885468406
They wear it so God doesn't pluck them up at the roots, take their soul they have sold to satan