Hillary Clinton was a no-show for a scheduled House Oversight Committee deposition on Wednesday related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. On Tuesday, former President Bill Clinton did the same. House Committee Chair James Comer said that Congress plans to “hold both Clintons in criminal contempt of Congress.” What does that mean? Well it could mean that a court compels them to testify or that they are referred to the Justice Department for criminal charges. It could also mean jail time if Congress has the stomach to enforce this. Last summer, the House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas to the Clintons as well as former Attorneys General Merrick Garland, Jeff Sessions, William Barr, as well as former FBI Directors James Comey, Robert Mueller and others. This list includes Republicans and Democrats both. Importantly, the subcommittee vote that led to the subpoenas had bipartisan support. Meaning Democrats voted to do it alongside Republicans. This was not a partisan exercise. The Clintons argue that other subpoena recipients also failed to appear. But there is an important distinction. While several officials responded through lawyers or provided documents, only Bill and Hillary Clinton skipped scheduled depositions outright, placing them in a different category of noncompliance. The real test here isn’t whether Congress can issue subpoenas. It’s whether it is willing to enforce them when the people ignoring them are powerful, well-connected, and historically untouchable. The post The Clintons Skip Epstein Depositions as Congress Weighs Contempt appeared first on Redacted.

According to reporting by The Washington Post, Israel has been quietly sending messages to Iran assuring its leadership that it does not intend to strike, so long as Iran does not strike first. On its face, that sounds like de-escalation but it’s not. At the very moment those assurances were being delivered through back channels, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on his way to Washington to pressure President Donald Trump to launch military action against Iran. You see what is happening here? Israel is pretending it won’t initiate the war on its own so long as it can get the U.S. to do it for them. This is not diplomacy. It is double-dealing at the highest level. Why would Israel bother with this trickery? Because they are already suffering from bad press over the utter destruction of Gaza and they want to, according to the Post, “avoid being perceived as escalating tensions.” But they really do want to escalate those tensions. They just want to get their loyal dog, the U.S. army to start it for them. Would Iran fall for that? Especially after the same game was played last summer when the U.S. sought a peace treaty and then struck Tehran anyway? According to the Post, they’re not. “Although Iranian officials responded positively to the Israeli outreach, they were wary of Israel’s intentions, said two officials with knowledge of the message exchange. Iran believed that even if the Israeli assurances were genuine, they left open the possibility that the U.S. military would carry out attacks on Iran as part of a campaign coordinated by the two allies, while Israel was training its firepower strictly on Hezbollah, the officials said.” What makes this especially alarming is that these are not abstract maneuvers. They involve real missiles, real cities, and real civilian populations. If the U.S. were to strike Iran under these conditions, Iran would almost certainly respond against U.S. assets, and Israel would be pulled into the very conflict it is pretending to be trying to prevent. The public would be told the escalation was inevitable, when in reality it was quietly engineered. If any other government were caught privately urging war while publicly signaling peace, it would be treated as a major scandal. Instead, this is being framed as normal geopolitics. It shouldn’t be. This is war chess played behind closed doors, with millions of lives as the pieces, and American voters kept deliberately in the dark about who is pushing whom toward the brink. The post Israel Promised Iran ‘No Strike’—While Urging the U.S. to Strike appeared first on Redacted.

UK Special Coverage Wokeness Has Brought Britain’s Second City Bankruptcy and Crime Birmingham is a case study in how diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives go wrong. UK Special Coverage If you want to understand what has gone wrong with Britain, there is probably no better place to start than Birmingham. As of this month, Birmingham’s refuse collectors have been on strike for a whole year, with no obvious end in sight. At the worst point, 23,000 metric tons of rubbish were left uncollected, with queues of residents reaching up to a mile long at mobile collection points. Rats the size of kittens roamed on the streets. Birmingham, England’s second city, had quite literally become a dump. The crisis began in 2012, when 174 female employees of Birmingham City Council successfully sued the city for what they claimed was “pay discrimination.” Now, given this is no longer the 1970s, no one was accusing Birmingham of paying women less than men for performing the same roles. Indeed, this was not “discrimination” as anyone might traditionally understand it. Instead, under the terms of the Equality Act 2010, equal-pay claims can succeed if a court determines that two entirely different jobs in the same company or public body are of the “same value.”  The UK Supreme Court agreed that Birmingham had been underpaying staff in “female-dominated” positions, such as cleaners and teaching assistants, relative to “male-dominated” roles like bin men and street cleaners, despite these jobs having nothing obvious in common with each other (and despite many of these male roles being more physically demanding, dirtier, and requiring unsocial hours).  Since 2012, the council has paid out more than £1 billion ($1.3 billion) in equal-pay claims to thousands of mostly female employees. As a result, in 2023,  Birmingham City Council, the largest municipal authority in Europe, was forced to effectively declare bankruptcy. By then, it still had around £760 million ($1 billion) worth of claims to settle. To get itself out of the red, Birmingham was forced to hike local taxes and cut all non-essential spending. Among the areas targeted for budget cuts was refuse management. Garbage men would be given new job titles, with reduced salaries and bonuses, in order to put them on an equal footing with the council’s female employees. The trade union, Unite, argued that this would leave hundreds of its members out of pocket, and so it launched an indefinite strike last year that is still underway. Last month, the agency workers brought in to collect rubbish during the crisis also decided to go on strike. As you might expect, there are other factors behind Birmingham’s bankruptcy. Local mismanagement has undoubtedly played its own role. An upgrade to the council’s IT payments-processing system, was expected to cost £19 million ($25 million) when commissioned in 2019, has cost £170 million ($228 million) and is still not functioning properly.  The city may have imposed brutal cuts to its most essential services, but local officials have fought hard to keep cash flowing to pet projects and, naturally, to themselves. Councilors voted to increase their own pay by 6 percent in January 2025, more than double the rate of inflation. Their rationale? The pay bump would encourage more “diversity” in local government. Similarly, the council’s department for “Community Services, and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion” still seems to be flush with cash, recently offering a six-figure salary to a new assistant director. Birmingham’s obsession with diversity—and its legal commitment to so-called equality—has had darker consequences, too. West Midlands Police, responsible for law enforcement in Birmingham, has become notorious for dispensing “two-tier justice.” In 2024, during the summer riots, gangs of local Muslims were given a free pass by police to roam around parts of Birmingham, wearing masks, holding weapons, menacing journalists and assaulting non-Muslim members of the public. In 2025, West Midlands Police fabricated intelligence to justify banning Israeli football fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv from visiting Birmingham for a friendly match. Early police notes indicated they feared local Muslims would turn up with weapons to attack Jewish and Israeli fans. In public, the police accused the Israeli fans of harboring violent designs on local Muslims. The scandal all but confirmed that a British police force has fallen under the thumb of Islamic sectarians. They were willing to spread antisemitic lies, and essentially to declare Birmingham a Jew-free city for the day, in order to preserve “community cohesion.” Of course, it’s not just Birmingham that has been steamrolled by the “equality, diversity and inclusion” juggernaut. Following the success of the lawsuit against Birmingham, similar pay disputes have forced Glasgow City Council in Scotland and Coventry City Council in England’s West Midlands to sell off property and slash vital services. Dozens of city and county councils fear they could go the way of Birmingham, thanks to dubious sex-discrimination claims. The private sector is in trouble, too. Major retailers, such as the Walmart-owned Asda and the clothing store Next, have been forced to pay out millions under the bizarre delusion that working in a store’s checkout should earn exactly the same remuneration as working in the warehouse. Birmingham, then, is a cautionary tale of what can happen when well-meaning DEI initiatives are allowed to run amok. Woke overreach is not simply a minor irritation; it has pushed England’s second-largest city into bankruptcy, worsened the pay and conditions of its working-class employees, and condemned millions of its residents to live in filth and squalor. But don’t expect any lessons to be learned. The post Wokeness Has Brought Britain’s Second City Bankruptcy and Crime appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture Time to Get Paranoid About Androids? Our coming AI future may not be apocalyptic, but it sure looks strange. Robots can do anything these days—repeatedly punch you in the face and kill you on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party, for instance. Alarming (or possibly just alarmist) new reports warn Western consumers that China’s rising industrial capacities in the field of manufacturing humanoid robots could be exploited by the nation’s leaders as a kind of electronic Trojan Horse, allowing them to murder their trusting purchasers.  At a recent GEEKCon tech convention in Shanghai, the cyber-security research group DARKNAVY put a brand of Chinese-made androids designed to perform simple domestic chores like polishing your chopsticks on a shared stage with a mannequin, representing its hypothetical flesh-and-blood owner. They then hacked into it, causing the murder-droid to obediently swing its arms and punch the helpless dummy to the ground, Isaac Asimov’s first law of robotics be damned. The clever machine then used its onboard wireless communications facilities to infect fellow robots stationed nearby to begin abusing their own dummy-owners, too.  The suggestion was made that, should Beijing so desire, deliberate in-built security flaws in such contraptions could be exploited at the command of Chinese leader Xi Jinping to have us all murdered by cold metal hands in our beds, once the appliances become standard fixtures in Western households. Robocriminals Some have criticized such warnings as hysterical, but not as hysterical as a rival new report from the European Union-wide policing body Europol, which predicted that non-Robocop officers of the future will have to tackle angry, rioting mobs attacking androids for stealing their own rightful human jobs, leaving the meat-people unemployed and penniless.  Yet in revenge, Europol worried, the robots themselves may fight back. It therefore called for massive investment in an armory of “robo freezer guns” to be issued to European policemen today, before it is all too late.  This is honestly the kind of “threat” European police forces now want their citizens to be taxed into oblivion to pay for: anything, it seems, rather than address the true, current, likely mass-public-order threat to the continent represented by thousands upon thousands of violent, but wholly non-metallic (apart from all the nuts-and-bolts shrapnel fragments hidden inside their suicide-vests), imported Muslims. How about begging the taxpayer to invest in a few Nerf-modified sausage-guns instead, or perhaps even salami bazookas, to deal with the larger neo-Ottoman offenders?  Europol added that, in Europe’s nightmare new future, super-intelligent robots could turn to crime, committing acts of terrorism and grooming children. At around the same time as Europol was predicting robo-geddon, meanwhile, another disturbing new report claimed to provide figures showing that AI was already linked to 50,000 global job losses in 2025; I don’t expect murderers, jihadis, and pedophiles to be amongst the automated careers. Terminators of Jobs Sensationalist prognostications like Europol’s may seem improbable, but mass robot-caused job losses across coming decades are in fact deemed by many non-mad futurologists to be a likely phenomenon. Indeed, in some advanced corners of the globe, they are already here. In 2015, a new guesthouse opened in the Japanese city of Nagasaki, given the strikingly honest name of “Strange Hotel.” Inside, the staff mostly consisted either of humanoid, Asian-looking robots, or of some special ones dressed like dinosaurs wearing small hats, which would check you in and out, clean your suite, and manage the cloakroom. Inexplicably, bedrooms come further equipped with a special concierge robot shaped like a female dwarf with a tulip for a head, complete with a smiley face drawn on it, who will do whatever you demand of it, no questions asked. If a stressed Japanese salaryman should ask for a girl to be sent up to his room, one day soon he might even be delivered one of the growing number of rubbery, dead-eyed sex-bots to service his needs, meaning that quite shortly androids could even pose a threat to certain rubbery, dead-eyed, but non-robotic inhuman members of the oldest profession. Long the preserve of adult-rated sci-fi movies, sex-bots are now real; some come with interchangeable heads and bodies, so if you’ve ever fantasized about enjoying congress with the face of Scarlett Johansson mounted atop the body of Oprah Winfrey, now’s your chance. Many also have removable mix-and-match genitalia, just like Jean-Michel Trogneux.  Another fine old profession at risk might be that of bricklaying. U.S. company Construction Robotics has managed to produce a disappointingly non-humanoid robot bricklayer (it’s basically a robotic arm fed by a conveyor belt) capable of accurately laying 3,000 bricks per day, as opposed to 500 by the arm of a mere hairless apeling. Some human employees are still needed to supervise and program SAM, the Semi-Automated Mason, which began with a prohibitive rental-rate of $21,000 per month. But as costs of manufacture come down, mass layoffs are expected across the industry.  Farmers, train-drivers, even surgeons are all now finding that robots can perform certain aspects of their duties to an even higher standard than they can. In fact, this very column was written for me this week entirely by a particularly clever scientific calculator. I kid, of course, but how many columnists these days are surreptitiously employing the plagiarism services of ChatGPT and its ilk? Responding to such reports, in 2017 the International Bar Association suggested that in future companies should have state-enforced quotas for human employees, and that all consequent human-made products on shelves should sport a sticker telling shoppers that they were shaped by pudgy little human hands, in the same way you have “Made in China” labels plastered on certain items today—like deadly killer robots, for example.  Tax On Tin In May 2017, readers’ data-banks may surely recall, the French presidential election was won by a particularly plastic-looking post-human android named Emmanuel Macron. He must be especially thankful that one of his rivals, Benoit Hamon, of the French Socialist Party, did not win the voters’ approval, because if Hamon had become president then Monsieur Macron, as an obvious inhuman robot, would have been facing a rather large hike in his own personal tax bill. This was because Hamon’s genuine proposal for solving the possible future problem of mass machine-stoked unemployment was to start charging the robot job-thieves tax!  Hamon is not the only person to have suggested treating R2-D2 as a mobile piggy-bank. Bill Gates, the sinister silicon-brained mastermind behind Microsoft Windows, has had this to say on the matter:  The human worker who does, say, $50,000 of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things; if a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think we’d tax the robot at a similar level. Alternatively, as one of the very richest (approximate) humans in the world, maybe we could just tax the likes of Mr. Gates a bit more?  That was actually part of Hamon’s plan, as he wished to charge all businessmen a tax on the value of every asset they owned, from shares to buildings to machinery, each and every year. In fact, this charge was key to Hamon’s plans. The initial problem of taxing robots would appear to be that robots don’t have any money. Therefore, when you examine Hamon’s proposals more closely, you will see that it is the robots’ corporate owners he actually wanted to tax, thus making the idea somewhat less insane than it initially appeared. It was the second part of Hamon’s plan which was actually mad. Wages of Tin Anticipating a future of never-ending joblessness, Hamon proposed robots’ owners be charged so much tax they would end up funding a free monthly wage of €750 a month for every French adult so they could lie around eating cheese all day long, watching a new robotic slave-class sweat oil for their own lazy French benefit. That’s €9,000 a year, for everyone, even the rich, because to cut down on admin costs (even government data-bots would be taxed, I suppose), it wouldn’t even be means-tested.  Considering how the robot tax would cost employers an estimated €400 billion per annum, however, Hamon doesn’t appear to have realized that this could well make it uneconomic for businessmen to employ robots in the first place, or at least to employ robots in France; businesses shifting not only human jobs abroad, but also metal ones, would be a disaster for everyone.  Furthermore, the €750 “citizens’ wage,” as such things are called, would not be issued in addition to current benefits payments but instead of them, at a single flat-rate, meaning that, for example, Bill Gates would get precisely as much support from the state as a blind one-armed dwarf in a wheelchair, should able-bodied Bill ever choose to set up residence in Paris. The whole scheme would cost €504 billion per year, over twice the level of French state spending at the time of Hamon’s election campaign, and utterly bankrupt the country.  “This is about looking into the future,” said Mr. Hamon, adding that his critics “could call it utopian if they want, but I am just anticipating the coming reality.” The actual coming reality, of course, was that Mr. Hamon gained a modern low of 6 percent of the vote, all but destroying the French Socialist Party in the process, with the human beings who still made up the majority of the Gallic electorate clearly thinking him a tin-pot tin-brain.  Voting Machines Further proof that today’s Western politicians really are quite robotic has just come from the UK, where Conservative Party MPs are using AI clones of their Labour Party opponents to test out questions before quizzing their biological originals for real in the House of Commons.  A computing firm, Nostrada AI, has created digital AI “clone” versions of all 650 British MPs, by feeding their previous speeches and comments into a large databank. The robot versions of Labour Ministers are programmed to tap into this database and respond to queries in the same syntax, tone of voice, and outright lies habitually made use of by the true MPs. How can you tell the difference, one may ask?  “Labour Ministers are so predictably wooden and stuck in their failing ways that even AI can predict what they will say,” joked one Conservative Party MP. If this is true, it actually represents a potential national security risk. Foreign leaders have recently used clones of Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer to predict how the man himself would act and react during EU negotiations and peace talks with Russia. (Why does it need a computer to predict the two simple words, “We surrender”?) On reflection, therefore, maybe it would be better if certain human jobs were indeed ceded to the robots, at least in the field of contemporary politics. Who would you rather be governed by—Benoit Hamon, Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, or a glorified mains-connected sandwich toaster? I choose the sandwich toaster. At least you can turn the bastard off. The post Time to Get Paranoid About Androids? appeared first on The American Conservative.