Conclusions In The Face Of Reality!
45 minutes ago
Thursday, November 13, 2025
Absentee Congressman
DISQUALIFIED! — Congressman Eric Swalwell Names Washington DC Home as ‘Principal Residence’ and Has NO California Address!
Trump 'shuts off' deadly fentanyl pipeline by securing 'historic' deal with China: Patel
FBI Director Kash Patel traveled to Beijing last week to finalize a deal with China to end the fentanyl production pipeline.
'The Chinese government agreed on a plan to stop fentanyl precursors.'
Patel joined White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday in the briefing room to share the results of that visit.
Patel credited the accomplishment to Trump’s “historic engagement with [Chinese] President Xi,” referring to the leaders' meeting in October.
Patel reported that the FBI has seized 1,900 kilograms of fentanyl — enough to kill 127 million — so far this year, noting that it was a 31% increase compared to the same time frame last year.“Fentanyl precursors are what makes up fentanyl. While we, the inner agency, the Department of Justice, have been fighting hard to seize and stop drug traffickers, we must attack fentanyl precursors — the ingredients necessary to make this lethal drug,” Patel stated.
RELATED: Trump reveals what's at stake if Supreme Court rules against his tariffs: 'Devastating'
Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty ImagesHe noted that he is the first FBI director to travel to China in over a decade.
“The Chinese government agreed on a plan to stop fentanyl precursors,” Patel said.
“The People’s Republic of China has fully designated and listed all 13 precursors utilized to make fentanyl. Furthermore, they have agreed to control seven chemical subsidiaries that are also utilized to produce this lethal drug.”
“Effective immediately, essentially, President Trump has shut off the pipeline that creates fentanyl,” he continued.
“This historic achievement has saved tens of thousands of lives.”
RELATED: Trump scores win for American farmers as China commits to ‘massive’ soybean purchases
Photo by DON EMMERT/AFP via Getty ImagesChina’s Commerce Ministry announced early this week that it would adjust requirements for some precursor chemicals, requiring a license to export them to the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Most fentanyl that enters the U.S. is from Mexico, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. The office reported in September that fentanyl continues to be the leading cause of overdose deaths in the country.
California is a danger to the rest of the US
California illegally issued thousands of commercial driver's licenses, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
A Wednesday morning press release from the department claimed that the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles “has admitted to illegally issuing 17,000 non-domiciled Commercial Driver’s Licenses (CDLs) to dangerous foreign drivers.”
'This is just the tip of the iceberg.'
Those who were issued the allegedly illegal licenses have been notified that those licenses no longer meet federal requirements and will expire in 60 days.
The DOT credited the findings to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s ongoing nationwide audit of non-domiciled CDLs. The review revealed “systemic policy, procedural, and programming errors in California’s non-domiciled CDL program,” the department reported.
RELATED: Exclusive: DOT withholds $40M from blue state for flouting English requirements for truckers
The department threatened in August to withhold funding from California if it refused to comply with English language proficiency requirements for truck drivers.
The California Highway Patrol indicated in July that it had no plans to place commercial drivers out of service for failing to meet ELP standards.
In October, the DOT announced that it was withholding $40 million from the blue state.
Photographer: Shelby Tauber/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The DOT stated that it will continue to pressure California to revoke illegally issued non-domiciled CDLs, noting that it is prepared to withhold $160 million in funding for noncompliance.
“After weeks of claiming they did nothing wrong, Gavin Newsom and California have been caught red-handed. Now that we’ve exposed their lies, 17,000 illegally issued trucking licenses are being revoked,” Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said. “This is just the tip of the iceberg. My team will continue to force California to prove they have removed every illegal immigrant from behind the wheel of semitrucks and school buses.”
“Once again, the [sic] Sean ‘Road Rules’ Duffy fails to share the truth — spreading easily disproven falsehoods in a sad and desperate attempt to please his dear leader,” a spokesperson for Newsom told Blaze News.
The California DMV did not respond to Blaze News' request for comment.
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
The Problem Of The Meatpackers
The Problem Of The Meatpackers
Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,
President Trump is boldly facing the problem of high meat prices but also dealing with the financial strains on farmers themselves.
The issue is reconciling the two.
Lower prices are great for consumers but also add to the financial problems of small farmers. Gradually, Trump has come to the conclusion that the real bottleneck is with meatpackers themselves, which is one of the oldest corporate monopolies in U.S. history.
He has posted the following:
“I have asked the DOJ to immediately begin an investigation into the Meat Packing Companies who are driving up the price of Beef through Illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation. We will always protect our American Ranchers, and they are being blamed for what is being done by Majority Foreign Owned Meat Packers, who artificially inflate prices, and jeopardize the security of our Nation’s food supply. Action must be taken immediately to protect Consumers, combat Illegal Monopolies, and ensure these Corporations are not criminally profiting at the expense of the American People. I am asking the DOJ to act expeditiously. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
With this posting, he has put his finger on the problem. Rep Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) points out that “Four meat packers control 85 percent of the meat processed in the U.S.”
Immediately, however, friends of mine in the free-market movement cried foul. He is blaming private enterprise whereas these corporations should be left alone by government to do whatever they want. They treated Trump’s call for intervention as some kind of imposition of government force on the freedom of commerce.
Who is correct here?
Once you understand the history, which goes very deep, you can see that Trump has hit an important point.
The meatpacking industry has been consolidating since the 1880s. This was codified with the Pure Food and Drug Act signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, alongside the Meat Inspection Act.
It was the first federal law to regulate food and pharmaceutical products. It not only prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded food, drugs, medicines, and liquors, it forced inspection on all U.S. meat processing and laid the foundation for the modern Food and Drug Administration, or FDA. It thereby created or really codified the meat cartel in America, something that has vexed small meat producers ever since.
Part of the reason for the lack of understanding here traces to a false historical understanding.
In the conventional historiography, Upton Sinclair wrote the novel called “The Jungle” that exposed the evils of the industry. As a result, Congress intervened to clean up the industry with new regulations. This became the headline legislation and event that set the agenda for the construction of the entire regulatory state in the United States.
The trouble is that this history is not true. It’s a fable.
The real story was told by Murray Rothbard and many other economic historians. Keep in mind that meatpacking as an industry separate from farming and ranching was a relatively new development. Traditionally, the industry was vertically integrated such that the people who raised the animals also slaughtered and processed them. The meatpackers and processors were attempting to replace these traditional practices. There is nothing wrong with that except that they used government power to unfairly tilt the scales in their favor.
The problems began in the 1880s when meatpackers sought to penetrate European markets. Imports were banned because the Europeans did not trust the quality. The industry then went to the government to certify the cleanliness and safety of their meat. The scheme worked and set forth a model for a different kind of competition. Industry would unite with government as a way of assuring consumers and also driving up the costs of entry into markets such that small processing could not afford them.
As Rothbard writes:
“In February 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was published and revealed many alleged horrors of the meat packing industry. Shortly thereafter, Roosevelt sent two Washington bureaucrats, Commissioner of Labor Charles P. Neill and civil service lawyer James B. Reynolds, to investigate the Chicago industry. The famous ‘Neill-Reynolds’ report that apparently confirmed Sinclair’s findings, in fact, only revealed the ignorance of the officials, as later congressional hearings indicated that they poorly understood how slaughterhouses worked and confused their inherently foul nature with unsanitary conditions.”
After “The Jungle” came out, J. Ogden Armour, owner of one of the biggest packing firms, defended government inspection of meat and said that the large packers had always favored and pushed for inspection. Armour wrote:
“Attempt to evade it [government inspection] would be, from the purely commercial viewpoint, suicidal. No packer can do an interstate or export business without Government inspection. Self-interest forces him to make use of it. Self-interest likewise demands that he shall not receive meats or by-products from any small packer, either for export or other use, unless that small packer’s plant is also ‘official’—that is, under United States Government inspection.”
There you have it. The big players in the industry actually favored government intervention.
Thomas E. Wilson, representing the large Chicago packers, said the following during the Congressional debate: “We are now and have always been in favor of the extension of the inspection, also to the adoption of the sanitary regulations that will insure the very best possible conditions. ... We have always felt that Government inspection, under proper regulations, was an advantage to the live stock and agricultural interests and to the consumer.”
Imagine, that was 120 years ago, and we are still dealing with the same problem. No meat can be sold to the consumer without being processed by a plant certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Even the quality of meats on the shelves are named according to official processing: USDA Prime, USDA Choice, and so on.
This has gradually put enormous pressure on small farmers who have to pay exorbitant prices for processing, when cheaper alternatives are readily available. Most small farmers would love to process their own meat on site and sell it directly to the consumers. But federal law forbids them from doing so. This has been true since 1906 and remains true today. The devastating results are the crisis we see today.
What about the issue of safety? Federal regulation did nothing to improve it and much to degrade it. They used the “poke and sniff” method to investigate safety, and did so for decades after, even though this method was known to spread pathogens from one carcass to another. It would have been much safer without federal intervention.
I’m thrilled and surprised that we are finally getting some discussion of this important topic today. The meat cartel certainly needs to be broken up. But the best method of doing so is simply to dismantle the regulatory impediments to competition. Farmers should be allowed to process and sell meat in any way that is advantageous to them. You would think that this would be an easy sell in Congress.
Part of the reason this topic is so triggering is that people do not understand the real history of the U.S. meat industry. If people did understand, it would become much clearer how it is that so many federal agencies are captured by industry interests. Indeed, capture might be the wrong word. They were set up to help big business in the first place.Helping small business instead requires the real restoration of a genuine free market.
Remember this? Police raid on Marion County Record sees $3M payout, apology: ‘Press has basically been under assault’
Police raid on Marion County Record sees $3M payout, apology: ‘Press has basically been under assault’
Officials in Marion County, Kansas, have agreed to pay more than $3 million and issue a formal apology over a 2023 police raid on a small-town newspaper that ignited national backlash and raised alarms about government overreach and press freedom.
The Marion County Record was raided after it received information about a local restaurant owner’s driving record — a story the paper ultimately chose not to publish.
Days later, police obtained search warrants accusing the newsroom of identity theft and computer crimes, seizing computers, phones, and reporting materials from both the paper’s office and the home of its publisher, Eric Meyer.
Meyer’s 98-year-old mother and co-owner, Joan Meyer, collapsed and died the day after the raid — a loss her son attributed to the stress of the search.
The incident drew condemnation from national media organizations and First Amendment advocates who said it reflected a growing willingness by government officials to intimidate journalists.
“They intentionally wanted to harass us for reporting the news, and you’re not supposed to do that in a democracy,” Meyer said after the settlement was announced.
Two independent prosecutors later found that no crimes had been committed and said the warrants relied on inaccurate information from an “inadequate investigation.”
As part of the settlement, Marion County Sheriff Jeff Soyez issued a written apology acknowledging his office’s role in the raid and expressing “sincere regrets” to Meyer and others targeted.
Former Police Chief Gideon Cody, who ordered the raid, resigned soon after and faces a felony charge of interfering with a judicial process for allegedly persuading a potential witness to withhold information from investigators.
He has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to stand trial in February.
Meyer said he hopes the outcome will deter future attempts by public officials to retaliate against journalists.
“The goal isn’t to get the money. The money is symbolic,” Meyer said. “The press has basically been under assault.”
The raid and ensuing lawsuit have become a national case study in press freedom and accountability, underscoring how even small local newsrooms can face government pressure — and how costly such overreach can become when it violates constitutional rights.
The federal Privacy Protection Act generally prohibits police from searching newsrooms or seizing materials from journalists, except in rare circumstances involving alleged criminal wrongdoing — a defense that local officials cited at the time.
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