In the News Week Ending 9-13-26

In the News Week Ending 9-13-26

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In an effort to appeal to Israeli voters ahead of the October elections, Prime Minister Netanyahu has been boasting that he manipulated President Trump to go to war in Iran. He sat down at a town hall event and he said, I was able to, through a thousand hours on American TV, influence the President and his administration to come to their right mind and attack Iran. A lot of people were called anti-Semitic in America for saying that Israel pushed us into the war, but apparently, aside from Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth saying it at the beginning of the war, now Prime Minister Netanyahu, who was in the Situation Room during this war, said it himself.

I wanted to see what members of Congress thought about this blatant influence campaign by Israel to push us into a disastrous war in Iran. I mean, Netanyahu’s just stating the obvious that’s already been stated. What do you think about the fact that any criticism of Israel, including that, saying, hey, they’re pushing us into these wars that are against our best interests, is called anti-Semitic until an Israeli says it, and then it’s off the hook? I think it’s doing a disservice to Jewish people, and particularly Jewish Americans, to equate lack of support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s war with anti-Semitism.

I think it’s ridiculous, and a lot of Jewish people feel the same way. This is after the fact that he didn’t support Trump’s plan, right? Maybe he didn’t like it, so maybe he’s a little upset with President Trump. He violated a lot of ceasefires.

So he’s very upset about it. The fact of the matter is, is no, Israel did not determine whether we were going into Iran. He was in the Situation Room.

I understand that, because obviously they probably have more concern than any other country over there. I mean, my goodness gracious. It’s our money, though, right? It is our money, and we spent a lot of it.

We shouldn’t. We spent a lot of it. You think? Well, let me ask you this question.

Here it is going five years into Ukraine. We’ve given them hundreds of billions. Has that been with it? You don’t think we should have spent it? No, I just think- I never gave them a nickel.

There you go, but you’re giving it to Israel, though. We’re not giving it to Israel. We’ve always supported Israel for years and put in the country a few hundred miles away from them that doesn’t even think they should exist.

He should probably worry about his own election, his own country, because I hear he’s not in good shape. Well, what are your thoughts about him saying that about our government? I think that that’s rude and completely just overstepping boundaries, and the president has smacked him down before on stuff like that. Nasty stuff.

I hope the Israeli people elect a very different government that actually is serious about Palestinian peace and Israeli peace. But this has been a government that has just lost the trust of people in this country, and I hope in their country as well. Netanyahu has been using every channel that he can to get the United States to do the things that he wants, not the things that are good for the United States people.

I can’t imagine he has that much sway. I think that’s more that just bravado that he has, and that’s what he’s done since he’s been in office. He’s an alpha male, there’s no question.

So I wouldn’t put it past him to stretch the truth. Politics in Israel are not my strong suit. I have no idea.

In two years, the federal government wants every car in America to have a camera in it, and that camera’s pointed at you, not the road. It tracks your eyes, your pupils, the position of your head, and how often you blink. And it’s looking for three things, whether you’re drunk, falling asleep, or distracted.

If the car decides that you’re any of those things, it can refuse to start, it can slow you down, or it can completely pull you over. This is a federal law, and there’s just one problem with it. The technology doesn’t work well enough.

In a federal report to Congress, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, the agency in charge of building out this rule, admitted there is no in-vehicle technology that can passively tell whether you’ve been drinking. As for detecting drowsiness and distraction, the cameras constantly get it wrong. And even if it was at 99.9% accuracy, you’d still get millions of false positives every single year.

Now imagine that camera not just nagging you, but refusing to start your car in a hurricane evacuation, or for parents trying to get a sick kid to the ER. Let’s talk about the data. Every blink, every glance, every microsecond your eyes left the road, logged down.

The law mandates the cameras, but it says nothing about who owns the footage, where it gets stored, or who can buy it. I’ve spent years fighting insurance companies over a few seconds of dash cam footage. Now imagine them with three years of your blink data.

They’ll use it to raise your premiums, deny your claims, and argue you were at fault even when you weren’t. The mandate is sold as a drunk driving fix. What we’re actually building is a surveillance system you can’t opt out of, and you’re paying for it when you buy your car.

Cities across the country are cutting their flock contracts in response to public pressure. But as our team tracked the cancellations, we noticed another trend that isn’t getting much pickup. City councils weren’t just getting rid of flock.

They were later signing up with other AI license plate reader companies who do the exact same thing, but could be even more harmful to the public. Every dot on this map that you can see is a city that now has a contract with Axon Enterprise or Motorola Solutions, the two companies benefiting most from flock’s downfall. You’ve probably heard of Motorola, primarily a phone company, but they’ve provided automated license plate readers, ALPRs, since 2019 when they bought a smaller company called Vigilant Solutions.

But you may not have heard of Axon. We’re seeing a significant number of agencies want to come over to Axon and convert Chrome existing license plate readers to us. Axon Enterprise is a long-time police contractor that has contracts with 85% of police departments across the country to supply body cameras, car cameras, and tasers.

Axon used to partner with flock, but ended their partnership in 2025 and decided to get into the mass surveillance business themselves. Since then, Axon has won hundreds of millions in federal contracts, including a $220 million contract to supply body cameras to ICE. Just two weeks after Trump bought up to $5 million in their stock, by the way.

Here’s a flock camera, here’s an Axon camera, and here’s Motorola’s version. Same invasive technology, different branding, and now, crucially, different name recognition. All these companies are doing mass surveillance, placing license plate readers across the country that log our movements into databases for police and other law enforcement to easily search and track us whether we’re accused of a crime or not.

But with Axon, their police car cameras act as mobile license plate readers scanning every car that drives by them. They’re even working on implementing facial recognition tracking on their existing body cams. And both Axon and Motorola are integrated with an AI-assisted emergency response platform backed by Marc Andreessen’s A16Z.

In both Axon and Motorola’s cases, there is also this concerted effort to combine streams of data into massive databases that a really good picture of your schedule, your habits, and your daily movements, with very little transparency or control over how that gets used. These companies are subject to the exact same abuses and lack of oversight that we’ve seen with Flock. Tracking all our daily movements warrantless, minimal oversight for officers, stalking women, protesters, and immigrants, and even sharing that information with federal agencies who aren’t supposed to have access to these databases.

Looking at this map, it’s clear that the fight against surveillance is picking up steam. But local communities have to stay vigilant. This isn’t just a fight against one company, Flock.

This is a fight against mass surveillance in general. And officials can’t be allowed to buy that same surveillance that communities oppose from just another company.

Two very different groups in China are fans of President Trump, and their reasons are mutually exclusive.

First group is Nationalist. They gave Trump the nickname Comrade Chuan Jianguo, meaning build the nation, and the nation is China. Jianguo is the signature name of the boys born in 1949, the year the People’s Republic was founded, and over 960,000 people carry it.

So calling Trump Chuan Jianguo puts an American president in the founding generation. Their argument, Trump’s tariffs, export controls, and withdrawals from international agreements didn’t contain China. They forced it into self-reliance and accelerated its rise.

In April 2025, the commentary site Guancha published a piece headlined, Chuan Jianguo makes mischief in America, forcing China’s rise. The second group is Liberal. These are anti-party intellectuals, peoples whose politics run the opposite direction, and they became genuine, unironic Trump supporters.

Yao Lin, in a paper published in the Journal of Contemporary China in 2020, traced the cause to what he called a beacon complex. It grows out of the lived trauma of Maoist totalitarianism. It sanitizes the United States as politically near perfect, produces a neoliberal affinity, and generates hostility towards what Chinese internet users call baizuo, the white left, a dismissive term for western progressives.

The Nationalist says Trump is good for China because he’s destroying America. The Liberal says Trump is good for China because he’s the only one hurting the party. Both are judging an American president by his effect on the Chinese state.

The Economist noted in December 2024 that the nickname is supposed to be ironic, but some who use it also genuinely admire aspects of him. A meme from August 2026 shows both sides at once. Trump’s face photoshopped onto a PLA officer saying in front of Tiananmen captioned, The bullet pierced my ear, but I can still hear the voice of the party.

The bullet references his attempted shooting. It reads as mockery until you notice the admiration underneath, wrapped in just enough irony to stay safe. Comrade Trump, wounded but still loyal, still devoted to building the Chinese nation.

The United States of America, welcome to the first ever midterm convention of any party. The midterms are not supposed to be won by the sitting president and we’re going to change that and we’ll make it an even more important time in our country and presidency. It’ll be something very special.

We have to do it. So I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot. I’m on the ballot.

Just one more time. If the Republicans win the house of representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000. And I’m asking you to let us finish the job we began with the greatest two years in the history of the presidency vote Republican and we will leave the world in our dust for generations to come.

There’ll be nothing like it. We’re right at that. I think the war is going to end immediately after the election.

I think the war will end immediately after the election because they can’t hold out any longer. They’re desperate to try and affect the election so that we can get a nice, weak group of people in there and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapon. All they want is a nuclear weapon.

And if they had a nuclear weapon, the whole world is in deep trouble. We want honesty in our elections. We want honesty in our country.

So please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much. He can’t even breathe that I will go out with my family, my friends.

I’ll do it anyway. I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do.

They never, there’s never been bigger cheaters that don’t care. I am going to go out and I’m going to get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November 3rd or we are going to vote before that. Right.

Okay. Ready? Ready? Here’s the way you’re okay. Are you ready? Look, front row.

Joe’s. Are you ready? The great. Oh, look at him.

The great ladies of North Carolina. He’s about number 300 rally. I don’t know how the hell they do it.

They are beautiful. Okay. Are you ready? Ready to finish the pledge? So we swear that on November 3rd, we are going to go out and vote.

And you know what? If you want, you can vote Democrat, but I don’t think there’s one person in this room. I don’t think so. So I don’t have to preface.

I okay. So help me God. Whoa.

Now I know. Now I’d say just about everybody was. You know what happens if you don’t vote? You go to hell.

You know that. Okay. You go to hell.

And I don’t want that to happen to you. So please go and vote.