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Illinois Just Adopted a Half-Baked Scheme to Tax Social Media

Government officials may not fully understand what social media is, but they damned well plan to do something about the ills it may or may not inflict on our society. They’ll happily start with extracting some money from the companies behind social media, though it may take a few tries, given politicians’ complete lack of understanding of the thing they want to tax. Illinois is a good example, where legislators just passed an attempt at a social media levy that runs afoul of its authors’ ignorance.

“A nearly $56 billion state spending plan is headed to Gov. JB Pritzker’s desk after the Democratic-controlled Illinois legislature approved it in the early-morning hours of another overtime spring session,” the Chicago Tribune‘s Dan Petrella noted last week. “The biggest source of new revenue is a new per-user tax on large social media companies.”

The governor’s signature is essentially guaranteed, since the budget proposal and social media tax originated in his office. Pritzker hopes to raise $200 million per year from the scheme. But the plan faces challenges, not least of which is that a similar tax passed by Chicago is tied up in court. Another and potentially more serious problem, as pointed out by Dan Levin of Straight Arrow News, is that “one of the elements that remains the most unclear is what exactly is being taxed? The language in the bill does not answer that question directly and is, frankly, confusing.”

As passed, the budget plan imposes a tax on social media companies based on “the average number of monthly users of the platform located in the State of Illinois.” Platforms with 100,000 to 500,000 “Illinois users” will have to pay $0.10 per user each month; platforms with 500,000 to 1 million “shall pay $40,000, plus $0.25 per month” per user; and platforms with over 1 million users will pay $165,000, plus $0.50 per user, each month on the number of users over 1 million. A provision adjusts the tax for inflation starting in 2028. Companies that fail or refuse to pay will be punished with a fee of “an amount equal to 100% of the unpaid fee and any penalties each month until the fee is paid.”

That’s an awful lot of numbers backed by dire threats. But it still doesn’t clarify how to tally up the bill.

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Trump family promotes coins commemorating White House UFC fight

As President Donald Trump prepares to host a UFC fight at the White House this week, his family is promoting a venture aimed at profiting off the spectacle by selling gold coins priced as high as $12,000.

The “Freedom 250”-themed silver and gold medallions feature Trump’s face and are being marketed as a collaboration between the UFC and the Trump Organization, which is run by the president’s sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr.

The coins, which are being sold in advance of Sunday’s fight, have been dubbed “Trump Coins” on a website that also boasts they were “designed by President Trump.” There are four coins for sale, ranging from a silver one that costs nearly $250 to a $11,999.99 gold medallion whose holder comes with a portrait of Trump and UFC chief Dana White.

The Trump Organization appears only to be licensing the president’s brand for the coins and is not manufacturing or selling them.

But the collaboration marks the Trump family’s latest involvement in efforts to cash in on his return to the White House — and yet another example of the president’s eagerness to put his name on an array of products, events and initiatives related to his administration.

Trump’s sons have licensed his name to promote phones, fragrances, cryptocurrency, golf courses and a range of other business ventures, drawing scrutiny for the unprecedented profits the Trump family has reaped through their close association with the commander in chief.

In response to questions about Trump’s involvement in the coin’s design and marketing, White House spokesman Davis Ingle rejected any suggestion of a conflict of interest.

“The Fake News’ continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read,” he said, adding that “Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public.”

The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump has talked up the UFC fight for weeks, while closely overseeing the construction of a giant staging area on the White House South Lawn called “The Claw” that now towers over the executive mansion.

And while the event is billed as part of the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, it is also set to take place on Trump’s 80th birthday.

That has prompted a lawsuit filed by two Virginia residents seeking to stop the fight. They argue it will financially benefit White and Trump, citing a report from the spring that Trump bought $50,000 in stock in UFC’s parent company.

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France’s Own Hack Is the Best Argument Against Its War on Encryption

Brussels and a run of European governments, France loud among them, have spent the past few years treating strong encryption as a problem to be solved.

The argument behind proposals like Chat Control is that the state needs a way to scan private messages to keep people safe and that it can be trusted to hold that kind of access without abusing it or losing control of it.

But France just handed that argument an awkward rebuttal. Tchap, the messenger the French government built for its own civil servants, got breached.

France’s National Cybersecurity Agency, ANSSI, detected the compromise on June 7, and DINUM, the digital affairs directorate that runs the platform, blocked the account involved and published an incident notice.

The intrusion broke neither the encryption nor the servers. Someone hijacked a legitimate user account, which is all an attacker needs when any one credential is a key to the same building.

That detail is the part the backdoor crowd keeps refusing to absorb. The encryption on Tchap did its job. DINUM says private conversations stay end-to-end encrypted even when an account is impersonated and that the attacker could reach only the unencrypted public chat rooms any authenticated user is able to find.

Security researchers were quick to note what that reassurance skips over. An attacker wearing a real user’s identity can see whatever that account sees in the moment, private rooms included.

A government backdoor is exactly that, an access path bolted on beside working encryption and France just demonstrated it cannot keep one of those paths shut for a single weekend.

DINUM has notified CNIL, the French data protection regulator, because personal information may have surfaced in whatever the attacker viewed. The directorate described its handling of the intrusion in a press release.

“At this stage, the account originating the malicious requests has been identified. It was immediately blocked to remove the attacker’s persistent access and allow for a thorough analysis of the data they were able to access. The investigation continues, including the study of event logs, to identify the conversations that the attacker was able to access and the nature of the exfiltrated data,” DINUM said.

The directorate also pushed responsibility back toward its own users, reminding them where the safe lines were supposed to be.

“A message has been sent to all Tchap users reminding them that a public chat room can be found and joined by any user and that its content is not encrypted. In accordance with Tchap’s terms of service, no personal, sensitive, or confidential information should be exchanged in public chat rooms: such exchanges should be reserved for private chat rooms.”

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It’s a Most Confusing Time To Be in the US Military

It’s a most confusing time to be in the U.S. military. Who knows why we fight?

At the top, there’s a lack of principles, a lack of clarity, a lack of care.

There’s no accountability for losses and bad decisions.

The government keeps the people isolated from war’s true costs. There’s no call for sacrifice. No war bonds, no draft, no increase in taxes. Costs are largely kicked into the future as the national debt soars ever higher.

An all-volunteer military is essentially told to follow orders. Never mind about the morality or legality of the same.

The people are encouraged to cheer on or otherwise to support their warriors and warfighters. Basically, to wave the flag but otherwise to go about their business.

A divided Congress has essentially rendered itself powerless over war-making. Meanwhile, Members of Congress fight for their share of an expanding Pentagon pie of money (or pork) for their districts.

The Secretary of State says we went to war with Iran because Israel forced the U.S. government’s hand. So apparently in this case the U.S. military fights for Israel.

So far, the main beneficiaries of the war appear to be defense contractors, fossil fuel companies and banks, so apparently the U.S. military is fighting for them as well.

Clearly, with Iran the U.S. military is not fighting to defend the American people or to support and defend the U.S. Constitution.

Again, who knows why we fight?

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Inflation Reaches 4.2% as Prices Outpace Paychecks

There is a lot of political discourse about “affordability,” but the meaning of the term can be difficult to pin down.

Is it just a jargony way of talking about high nominal prices? Is it really all about housing? Could it be, as President Donald Trump has suggested, a “con job” invented by Democrats to make his administration look bad? Different people will have different answers, and I suspect we will continue to debate those questions through the midterms and into the 2028 presidential cycle.

But probably the most straightforward way to think about the “affordability” question is the relationship between two figures published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS): average hourly earnings and the consumer price index. When the former is rising at a faster rate than the latter, the pay for the average worker is rising faster than prices. For that worker, life is getting more affordable.

When inflation is rising faster than wages, however, the opposite is true. And that’s what is happening now.

Wages grew by 3.4 percent over the past year, the BLS reported last week. On Wednesday morning, the BLS reported that inflation has climbed by 4.2 percent over the past 12 months, thanks in large part to a sharp increase in prices (fuel prices, in particular) since the start of the Iran war in March.

With prices rising faster than wages, the BLS also reported on Wednesday that “real average hourly earnings”—that is, wage growth once you account for inflation—were down by 0.3 percent in May.

Averages only get you so far, of course. Some Americans are feeling the sting of inflation more than others, depending on their purchasing habits and lifestyles, and wages are never rising for all workers equally. Still, there’s no getting around it: Life is less affordable now than it was a few months ago—before the Trump administration steered the country into a war of choice in the Middle East.

And, yes, the runaway inflation that America experienced during the first part of President Joe Biden’s term in office was a lot worse than what the country is seeing now. But since early 2023, wage growth had consistently outpaced inflation even as inflation remained above the Federal Reserve’s target annual rate of 2 percent.

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A Chinese robot in a clown wig kicked a child. Your kid could be next.

At a Children’s Day demo in Xinjiang last week, a Chinese Unitree G1—seventy pounds of metal plus a clown wig—wound up for a roundhouse kick and planted it square in a small child’s stomach. The kid doubled over. The crowd, by most accounts, kept clapping. (The kid is reportedly not seriously injured.)

The point is, there’s something most people get wrong about killer robots. We picture malice—red eyes, Skynet, a machine designed to hurt us. Relax. That’s the optimistic version.

The dystopian version is dumber, and a lot more likely: That Unitree robot didn’t want to kick the kid. It just wasn’t built well enough not to. Not hatred. Just sloppy programming, made-in-China safety mechanisms, and a child standing in the way.

And it’s not a one-off. China’s humanoid robots have face-planted in half-marathons, kicked an engineer in the groin mid-demo, and slapped a different kid across the face during a dance routine. The showroom magic is wearing thin. Turns out “move fast and break things” hits differently when the things it breaks are innocent people’s faces.

And you think this only affects China? No way. Chinese robots are already infiltrating New York City. Protect your children. Seriously.

My point is, the danger from Chinese AI isn’t that it’s evil. It’s that it’s rushed, unaccountable, and getting shoved into crowds before anyone’s sure it works.

The 1987 classic Robocop warned us about this, people! ED-209 machine-gunning a hapless junior executive was never about malice. Just a programming glitch. Oopsie! (NSFW clip from that movie)

At least if it’s malice, can you plan for that. But if you want to avoid accidents, you need to completely stay away from Chinese-made robots.

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Spencer Pratt Says He Was Victim of Arson Attack at His Crystals Company Office: ‘This Was No Accident’

Reality TV personality and former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt is claiming that a fire at his Pacific Palisades crystal company office was no accident and may have been politically motivated.

The fire broke out on Thursday at the Highlands Circle business complex, where Pratt Daddy Crystals is located.

The building, which previously housed the Casa Nostra restaurant, was undergoing renovations at the time.

Multiple fire crews responded to the scene, and the Los Angeles Fire Department’s Arson Unit was later called in to investigate.

No injuries were reported.

Pratt told The New York Post that he believes the fire was deliberate.

“I want to be careful to not compromise an arson investigation, but this incident is very suspicious,” Pratt said.

“I will wait for the investigators to make public the details, but this was no accident, and the timing of this…on the heels of all of the contentious election tomfoolery of the last two weeks, it is very suspect, indeed.”

He went further, suggesting the fire could be retaliation for his criticism of Democrat politicians.

“There are many unscrupulous people in this city who will stop at nothing to silence people who expose the corruption that has overrun our city,” Pratt said.

“This fire was not an accident, and it would not surprise me in the least if this were a reprisal for my work in opposing Karen Bass and Nithya Raman, and having the audacity as a civilian to try and do my civic duty and improve our broken city.”

The fire came just days after Pratt placed third in the June 2 Los Angeles mayoral primary with 26% of the vote. Many have questioned the validity of his seeming to have secured second place, only to be pushed out by a sudden influx of ballots for his opponent.

Pratt recently posted a defiant video promising to release damaging evidence related to the campaign and city leadership.

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The Dutch Covid Inquiry Is Not Looking for the Truth

Across the world, the response to Covid looked strangely alike: the same lockdowns, the same shuttered schools and businesses, the same insistence that there was only one responsible course and that to question it was to put lives at risk. Country after country moved in near lockstep. 

To me, that uniformity remains one of the most troubling features of those years. Measures so similar, so sweeping, and adopted so quickly are difficult to explain as dozens of governments independently reach the same conclusion. Whatever the truth behind that coordination, the Covid era cannot be understood one nation at a time. What was done to people’s freedoms — and how each country now chooses to examine it, or to look away — concerns us all. What follows is one country’s reckoning.

From a distance, the Netherlands can look like an open society settling its accounts with the pandemic.

A civil case is moving through the court in Leeuwarden. Seven citizens — one of whom has died since the case began — are suing seventeen defendants for harm they attribute to the mRNA Covid shots. The defendants are not minor figures: the former prime minister, Mark Rutte; the former health minister, Hugo de Jonge; Marion Koopmans, the virologist who sat on the team of experts advising the cabinet; Jaap van Dissel, who as head of infectious-disease control at the national health institute chaired that team — the Outbreak Management Team (OMT), which steered the country’s Covid response from January 2020 until 2022 — and was the public face of the lockdown advice; the chief executive of Pfizer, Albert Bourla; and Bill Gates. Gates argued that a Dutch court had no business judging him. The court disagreed and kept the case.1 It continues, slowly.

To a foreign reader, that reads as a country with room to ask hard questions.

It is worth pausing on what became of the man who brought the case. Arno van Kessel, one of the two lawyers behind it, spent 260 days in pre-trial detention. He was arrested in June 2025 — the day after he filed papers in the case — in an investigation into a network of self-described “sovereigns,” people who reject the authority of the state. To my mind the label sits oddly on him: his whole method was the courtroom. He is a lawyer who took the government to court, not a man who denies that courts have power over anyone. No criminal court has convicted him of anything; he remains a suspect, and a suspect only. In late February 2026 the judges suspended his detention, in part because the prosecution’s case was moving so slowly.2 By then he had been struck from the bar and could no longer stand beside his own clients. And so the lawyer who had brought that suit against Rutte, De Jonge, Koopmans, and Gates had himself been shut out of the courtroom.

Then, on 29 May 2026, the inquiry into the Corona policy opened its public hearings. And a similar picture appears.

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Switzerland Votes Tomorrow on Proposal to Limit Population to 10 Million People

The Swiss may cap the number of inhabitants.

Against the backdrop of the unchecked mass migration, neutral Switzerland is considering closing its borders and establishing a ceiling to the number of people living in the country.

The cap applies to Swiss nationals and migrants, but as the birth numbers all around Europe are declining, it stands to reason that the objective of tomorrow’s vote is to stop the invasion.

So, Switzerland will vote to decide on a proposal to be the first country in the world to limit its population: 10 million.

BBC reported:

“The move is backed by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, which describes it as a ‘sustainability initiative’ aimed at easing pressure on housing, public services and the environment.

The Swiss government, all other major parties, business leaders and trade unions have dubbed the proposal a ‘chaos initiative’, arguing it will deprive hospitals and hotels of much needed staff, and damage hard-won relations with the European Union, leaving non-EU member Switzerland isolated in a very risky world.”

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‘The Suicide Of Europe’: Historic EU Migration Pact Goes Into Force Today As Fracture-Lines Grow

Six years ago, in 2020, French political leader Marine Le Pen described the Migrant Pact, which was then in the planning stages, as the “suicide of Europe.” She said it would bring 60 to 70 million new migrants to Europe, as Remix News reported at the time.

Europe is about to find out just how prophetic its critics have been. On June 12, the highly contested EU Migration Pact officially came into force, instantly triggering a sharp political divide across the continent.

Brussels is already signaling a hardline approach toward resistance; the bloc’s own EU Migration Commissioner recently admitted that the Union is preparing a “crackdown” on member states that refuse to comply with the new relocation directives.

At the heart of the controversy is the pact’s mandatory migrant quotas, framed by Brussels as “burden-sharing.” In practice, critics argue this distribution system allows nations like Germany and France a convenient mechanism to offload asylum seekers onto Central and Eastern European nations – such as Poland and Hungary – which have historically maintained strict anti-refugee stances.

Europe’s anti-immigration politicians are already responding to what they say is a law that will bring disaster to Europe. Le Pen, six years later, is calling for a “constitutional referendum on immigration.”

“Tomorrow, the Migration Pact will enter into force. It will require the States of the European Union to welcome migrants, under penalty of fines. When we come to power, we will propose to the French a constitutional referendum on immigration, the only means to regain control of our migration policy,” she wrote on X.

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