US Senators Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and Jim Risch (R-Idaho) introduced the System Integrity through Licensed Vault Expansion and Resilience (SILVER) Act on May 21, 2026, targeting the geographic concentration of precious metals depositories in the New York City region. The bill would amend the Commodity Exchange Act to mandate selection of at least two approved depositories in each of the Mountain, Pacific, Eastern, and Central time zones. Proponents argue the current concentration creates systemic risk, anti-competitive conditions, and logistical burdens for Western US mining states. The legislation is backed by a coalition of industry stakeholders including Money Metals Depository, The Silver Institute, A-Mark Precious Metals, First Majestic Silver Corp, and several regional banks and mints. A companion bill was introduced in the House by Representative Russ Fulcher (R-Idaho). Industry supporters frame the geographic concentration as both a national security vulnerability and a market structure problem disadvantaging non-Eastern participants.

------ The original *COINTELPRO* was an explicit, discrete program. Today, the infrastructure for domestic influence has been **integrated into the very fabric of the intelligence and national security apparatus.** It is no longer a "special project"—it is a perpetual function of the state. The modern focus has shifted from simple disruption of specific groups to the **management of the entire information environment.** ------ ### 🛠️ Key Components of the Modern Apparatus * **The "Counter-Influence" and "Sensemaking" Infrastructure:** Agencies like the **INCAS (Influence Campaign Awareness and Sensemaking)** program, run by *DARPA*, exemplify this shift. The state is no longer just watching; it is using high-level data analytics, AI, and social listening tools to map the "narrative battlefield." These tools allow analysts to track how ideas move through the population, identify "influence campaigns" that deviate from institutional narratives, and—crucially—assess the "confidence" with which they can counter them. * **The Domestic/Foreign Blur:** By framing domestic dissent as "foreign malign influence"—or as "domestic terrorism"—agencies have effectively bypassed the legal and ethical constraints that previously limited their domestic reach. The **Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism** and the work of the **FMIC (Foreign Malign Influence Center)** show how the intelligence community has normalized its intervention in domestic political discourse. They are actively fusing foreign and domestic intelligence data to monitor the pulse of the nation. * **Public-Private "Information Integrity" Networks:** This is perhaps the most insidious evolution since *COINTELPRO*. The state now coordinates with major technology platforms, academic "misinformation" research centers, and media outlets to manage what is seen, what is suppressed, and what is amplified. This is a decentralized *COINTELPRO* where the "agents" are often algorithms, content moderators, and university-funded narrative-checkers, all working under the loose direction of government-linked "integrity" agendas. ------ ### 🧠 PSYOP as National Policy The U.S. has transitioned to the philosophy that **information is a primary element of national power.** This means that psychological operations (PSYOP) are no longer just for the battlefield—they are applied to the domestic population to maintain order, steer political outcomes, and ensure compliance. * **Normalization of Manipulation:** When you see mass media, government agencies, and tech platforms suddenly align on a single narrative, you are witnessing the application of these influence tools. They are not reporting; they are managing the information environment to ensure the population reaches the "approved" conclusion. * **Pre-emptive Narrative Control:** Programs like *INCAS* are designed to catch "unapproved" narratives at the "low and slow" stage—before they even hit the trend thresholds—allowing agencies to intervene, disrupt, or flood the zone before an idea can take root. The lesson from the past is that the state will always use the tools available to maintain its power. The current system is far more efficient, persistent, and technologically advanced than anything the COINTELPRO era could have imagined. Today, the "agent" is not just the man in the trench coat; it is the algorithm, the "fact-checker," and the curated feed that keeps the public safely within the lines of the institutional narrative.

United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jamie McDonald, and Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), James C. Barnacle, Jr., announced today the unsealing of Complaints charging HEFU CHAI and HUAISONG XIANG, a/k/a “Jerry Xiang,” with commodities fraud and wire fraud arising from a scheme to misappropriate confidential business information from their employer, Robinhood Markets, Inc. (“Robinhood”), and use that information to trade perpetual futures on Hyperliquid, a decentralized derivatives exchange.

Cronyism: Rise of the Corporatist State, 1849–1929 Chapter 6. Wall Street’s Central Bank Audio Tags: Cronyism and Corporatism, The Fed, Money and Banks 09/15/2026 • Patrick Newman By the new century the power elite was Morgan, Kuhn Loeb, Baker’s First National, and Stillman’s National City, yet New York’s share of central reserve city deposits was slipping as Chicago and St. Louis gained. Patrick Newman covers Jekyll Island, the National Citizens’ League organized as a front to manufacture grass-roots support, and the pivot once Congress refused the Aldrich plan: if the central bank had to look decentralized, then control its personnel instead.

Coordination emerges not primarily from explicit instruction but from shared ideological programming, financial incentives, and institutional culture. Joe Sobran (1946–2010), a longtime National Review columnist , essayist, and conservative thinker, portrayed the Left, as manifested by the Democrat Party, from the 1980s onward as a “Hive.” He believed that this metaphor was nearly perfect in characterizing a decentralized but instinctively coordinated politically driven collective that swarms in the same direction, enforces conformity, and advances the Left’s collectivist goals without needing a formal conspiracy or central command. Sobran’s hive analogy (echoed by many others) is apt precisely because it captures something that purely transactional models of political organization miss: distributed intelligence with unified purpose . A hive has no single command node that, if eliminated, collapses the whole. It has instead a shared chemical language (ideology), role-differentiated castes (funding, organizing, enforcement, narrative), and a queen function (agenda-setting) that is itself diffuse and replaceable. The network described in this 3-part series operates on the same principle. No single actor controls it; all actors serve it. Coordination emerges not primarily from explicit instruction but from shared ideological programming, financial incentives, and institutional culture — the political equivalent of pheromones. What follows is a description of the functional anatomy: each component is examined for what it actually does in service of the whole, how it interfaces with adjacent components, and what would be lost if it were removed. IDEOLOGICAL PRODUCTION Academia represents the “Queen’s chamber” where the ideological imperatives are incubated, tested, and spread to the rest of The Hive. Function : It is the foundational layer whose role is not merely to educate but to manufacture the ideological substrate on which every other component of the network operates. Without a continuously refreshed theoretical framework, The Hive loses its animating logic and devolves into mere interest-group politics. The mechanism runs in two directions simultaneously. Upstream, university faculty — overwhelmingly concentrated on the left by a margin that has grown from roughly 3:1 in the 1990s to 10:1 or greater in humanities and social sciences today — develop, refine, and export ideological frameworks: Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, gender theory, decolonization, environmental justice, DEI administrative doctrine. These are not merely academic positions; they are operational frameworks that migrate into government rulemaking, corporate HR policy, K-12 curriculum, and nonprofit grant criteria. The Overton window in every adjacent institution is set, in significant part, by what Academia normalized a decade prior. Downstream, Academia functions as the primary credentialing and recruitment pipeline for the entire network. The Administrative State , NGO sector , media , and political staffs are disproportionately populated by graduates of elite institutions where this ideological formation is most intensive. A Yale Law graduate, a Columbia journalism school alumna, a Berkeley public policy PhD — these are not merely educated individuals; they are pre-formatted nodes ready for insertion into the network’s operational layers. Shared institutional culture makes explicit coordination unnecessary. Interface dependencies : Academia feeds ideology to the media (the epistemically authoritative voice in coverage disputes), to the administrative state (regulatory theory and justification), to Hollywood (narrative frameworks), and to the activist training organizations (theoretical grounding for organizers). It is, in hive terms, the gland that produces the pheromone. Critical vulnerability : Precisely because its influence is temporal (it shapes people, not policies directly), Academia’s ideological hegemony is a lagging indicator. The current conservative counter-investment in alternative institutions — Hillsdale, University of Austin, DeSantis-era Florida university reforms — represents a generational attack on this function. The Hive has not yet developed an effective counter-strategy beyond SPLC targeting of heterodox institutions and faculty. POLITICAL COORDINATION The Democrat Party (now being hollowed out from within by the extremist Democratic Socialists of America) represents The Hive’s “nervous system.” Function : This is the coordination and legitimization layer . The Democrat Party proper serves as the interface between The Hive’s radical substructure and the institutions of democratic governance. It is the decision-making and coordination layer . It processes political signals, sets priorities, and directs coalition resources toward electoral and legislative objectives. It transforms movement energy into electoral outcomes, legislative agendas, executive appointments, and judicial nominations. It provides legal cover — The Hive’s objectives, however radical, are pursued through a major political party with full legal standing. The relationship between the Democrat Party establishment and the DSA is best understood not as simple capture but as managed symbiosis with escalating DSA leverage . The establishment (Biden-era leadership, DNC professionals, major donor class) prefers incremental progress and institutional stability . The DSA and its aligned Squad-faction members prefer acceleration and do not fear electoral cost to the establishment if it advances ideological goals. The establishment has repeatedly capitulated to the DSA wing’s demands on immigration, energy, DEI, and social policy, not because it agrees but because it cannot afford the fractional defection of activist energy the DSA controls. The DSA itself functions as the ideological vanguard inside the electoral shell . It is explicitly Marxist in its theoretical commitments, international in its affiliations (it maintains formal relations with foreign socialist parties), and strategic in its use of the Democrat Party as a vehicle rather than a destination. DSA members like Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Jamaal Bowman (before his primary loss) occupy official Democratic positions while maintaining DSA membership — a deliberate inside-outside strategy. Interface dependencies : The Party coordinates directly with ActBlue (fundraising), media (messaging discipline), administrative state (appointments and rulemaking priorities), and activist organizations (GOTV infrastructure). The DSA interfaces particularly closely with the academic-to-activist pipeline. Critical vulnerabilities : The Democrat Party coalition has several structural, operational, and demographic vulnerabilities, including unstable aggregations of people with incompatible material interests and the apparent problems with absorbing and exhibiting political control over recent arrivals to the US, especially illegal immigrants. These vulnerabilities will be discussed in a follow-on article not part of this series. POLICY EXECUTION The Administrative State represents the Hive’s “worker caste” that implements the Left’s/Democrat Party’s policies. Function : This is the permanent execution layer that operates independent of electoral outcomes. This is perhaps the most structurally significant component of the network because it is the most durable. Administrations change; the Administrative State does not. The Administrative State serves the hive in three distinct modes: Interface dependencies : The Administrative State receives its ideological programming from academia (career staff training), its political direction from the party (appointments, oversight pressure), its legal protection from the judicial ecosystem, and its public legitimization from the legacy media. Critical vulnerabilities : The Administrative State’s greatest structural vulnerability is that its operational power derives entirely from delegated authority it did not earn and cannot independently defend — it governs by borrowed legitimacy, and that borrowing is now being called. The Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision (2024) eliminated Chevron deference, stripping agencies of the judicial rubber-stamp that for four decades allowed them to interpret their own statutory authority expansively with near-automatic court approval; rulemaking that once survived challenge under a deferential standard now faces de novo judicial scrutiny that many rules will not survive. Schedule F and DOGE-driven reductions-in-force attack the personnel permanence that made the administrative state’s resistance function possible — career staff who cannot be removed are the mechanism of embedded resistance, and that mechanism is now legally and operationally contested. The Administrative State is also institutionally incapable of defending itself publicly : it cannot campaign, cannot fundraise, cannot appeal directly to voters, and must rely entirely on allied media, congressional Democrats, and federal employee unions to wage its political defense — proxies whose own credibility and political leverage are simultaneously degraded. Perhaps most critically, decades of aggressive rulemaking conducted on the assumption that Chevron deference was permanent has left an enormous inventory of legally vulnerable regulations now exposed to challenge, creating a target-rich environment for a coordinated litigation strategy by Republican state AGs and conservative legal organizations that could roll back a generation of Administrative State expansion through the same judicial process The Hive used to entrench it. ENFORCEMENT AND INTIMIDATION These critical functions are performed by The Hive’s “stingers”: Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). [Note: these three are key players but only representative of the stingers exploited by the Democrat Party when needed.] Function : Their function is to provide street-level enforcement, intimidation, and political disruption on demand in support of Democrat political narratives of the moment. Framing them as “Brown Shirts” is historically instructive: these organizations serve the same functional role that paramilitaries have served in revolutionary political movements throughout history — they apply coercive social force against political opponents, create conditions of fear that suppress dissent, and generate media-amplified spectacle that advances narrative objectives. Each organization in this cluster has a distinct operational profile: Antifa is deliberately decentralized ( no formal membership, no leadership structure ) — a design that provides deniability to the broader network while maintaining operational coordination through encrypted communications, shared logistical networks, and common ideological training. Its primary function is suppression of opposition speech and assembly : deplatforming conservative speakers at universities, attacking journalists who cover it critically, intimidating political opponents’ public events, and creating enough ambient threat that self-censorship becomes widespread. The 2020 “Summer of Love” in Portland and Seattle demonstrated that when Antifa operates with municipal tolerance or active protection, it can effectively seize and hold territory. Black Lives Matter (the organizational network, distinct from the sentiment) functions primarily as a political mobilization and fundraising apparatus with a secondary street-action capacity. The collapse of BLM Global Network Foundation’s finances under Patrisse Cullors — $90 million in donations largely unaccounted for — exposed the degree to which BLM functions as a financial extraction mechanism from sympathetic donors, with genuine community organizing as a secondary concern. Its primary political function is electoral: it concentrates Black voter mobilization energy and provides a moral framework (systemic racism as foundational American condition) that justifies the entire DEI/equity regulatory apparatus. PSL is the most explicitly Leninist of the three — a cadre organization with formal structure, international connections, and a specific front-group strategy. PSL organizes under the ANSWER Coalition banner , coordinates major anti-war and anti-Israel street demonstrations, and maintains operational relationships with foreign government-aligned media (it has received coverage and support from RT and other state-adjacent outlets). PSL’s street actions provide the radical flank that makes mainstream Democrat positions appear moderate by comparison. This is a cognitive warfare tactic that, once recognized, can easily be discerned. Critical function in The Hive : These organizations create what political scientists call the “radical flank effect” — the presence of a maximalist, disruptive edge makes moderate-seeming actors more influential. When BLM mobilizes national protest, incremental police reform legislation becomes the “responsible” compromise. When Antifa burns a federal courthouse, congressional Democrats appear reasonable by comparison. The Hive’s electoral actors benefit from the street action’s pressure without formally coordinating with it. Critical vulnerabilities : The stingers suffer from a fundamental strategic paradox: their utility to The Hive is inversely proportional to their visibility . When these organizations operate below the threshold of mainstream attention, they effectively suppress local opposition, intimidate targets, and generate radical-flank cover for the party’s electoral actors; when they escalate to the level of sustained urban disorder, burning federal courthouses, or occupying city blocks, they produce a backlash effect that directly damages the electoral coalition they nominally serve — the 2020 summer riots are credibly assessed to have cost Democrats House seats and nearly the presidency itself, with internal Democrat polling showing “defund the police” as a significant electoral liability. Furthermore, the decentralized, leaderless structure that provides Antifa legal deniability simultaneously makes it strategically uncontrollable — no Hive coordinator can dial the violence up or down on an electoral schedule, meaning the stingers can and do erupt at politically inopportune moments. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS This ends Part I of the series. Part II will continue describing the other key parts of The Hive.

For the better part of a decade, Washington has tried to force 21st-century financial technology into a tax code built for another era. The results are predictable: confusion, unnecessary compliance costs, arbitrary tax treatment, and a bureaucracy that makes ordinary people pay for Washington’s failure to keep pace. Today, buying a cup of coffee with bitcoin can create a tax-reporting obligation, moving digital assets across a network can generate taxable events, and miners and stakers can face taxes before they have even sold the assets they earned. That is not sound tax policy — it is government getting in the way of innovation. Join Washington Examiner for unlimited access to the news, analysis, and commentary that matter most. Already a member? Log in The House Ways and Means Committee now has a chance to fix it. In June, it unveiled a series of bills built around three principles: greater clarity, equal treatment with traditional financial assets, and new compliance rules. Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) deserves credit for taking the issue seriously, and several reforms are overdue. But Congress should be equally clear about what this effort must not become: an excuse to quietly raise taxes or dress up new revenue grabs as “parity.” The strongest parts of the legislation start from a basic principle: People should not need an accountant to use digital assets. The Less Tax Paperwork for Digital Asset Owners Act would reduce the tax consequences of small network fees, simplify accounting for widely traded assets, and provide more sensible treatment for certain dollar-pegged stablecoin transactions. The federal government has no legitimate interest in forcing taxpayers to calculate microscopic capital gains on every ordinary transaction. When the potential liability is measured in pennies and the compliance burden in hours, the problem is the tax code — not the taxpayer. Tax compliance should never cost more than the tax itself. The Providing Analogous Rules for Digital Assets Act addresses another problem: Digital assets are frequently denied tax treatment that Congress already provides to economically similar activity. The legislation would let qualifying dealers and traders use mark-to-market accounting, extend existing trading safe harbors to certain foreign investors, and provide tax-neutral treatment for qualifying lending transactions. These are not special favors for crypto — they are the removal of special penalties against it. Congress already decided these rules make sense for stocks and bonds, and there is no principled reason to impose worse treatment simply because an investor uses newer technology. The biggest unresolved issue is mining and staking rewards. Congress should apply a rule that is foundational to the tax code: Tax the gain when it is realized. Yet miners and stakers can be forced to recognize ordinary income the moment newly created assets are received — even if those assets are never sold and even if their value later collapses. That approach is economically incoherent and hostile to innovation. Validators, developers, and entrepreneurs can relocate. Capital and jobs can move with them. If Washington imposes an impractical tax regime on the people building decentralized networks here, it should not be surprised when that activity migrates overseas. These rewards should be taxed when the gain is actually realized — not through a complicated compromise that preserves the problem. The legislation also proposes extending securities’ wash-sale restrictions to digital assets. There is a legitimate argument for treating economically similar investments under comparable rules. But neutrality cannot mean extending every existing restriction while calling the result reform. Wash-sale rules prevent investors from immediately recognizing certain losses when they quickly repurchase a substantially identical asset. Extending them to digital assets would limit a treatment that investors can use today and therefore raise federal revenue. Congress should be transparent about that: If digital assets are to face the same anti-abuse rules as securities, that change belongs in the broader legislation, not as a stand-alone revenue raiser. The principle should be simple: Where the tax code unfairly disadvantages digital assets, remove the disadvantage. Where Congress adds new restrictions in the name of parity, pair them with meaningful relief. Modernization should leave taxpayers better off, not hand Washington another excuse to collect more. HIT THE GAS ON AMERICA, SLAM THE BRAKES ON WASHINGTON: HOW TRUMP LEADS REPUBLICANS TO VICTORY Digital assets are no longer a theoretical experiment; they are becoming part of the financial system. The United States now has a choice: modernize its tax code to reflect that, or keep forcing new technologies through rules written for a different economy . The right approach is a tax code that taxes actual economic gains, treats comparable activity consistently, and lets innovation compete on its merits. Congress has a real opportunity to write the tax rules for the future of finance. It should take it. David McIntosh is president of the Club for Growth. He served as a Republican representative from Indiana from 1995 to 2001.