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Midterm Palpitations

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

Recent regional special elections have seen Democratic candidates win a number of special election races.

Now energized left-wing politicos remind the nation daily that every incumbent president, except three over the last century, has suffered substantial midterm losses in Congress.

Polls show Trump suffering an average 11-point negative unfavorability rating.

So Democrats promise to soon stop all new legislation and end Trump and his counterrevolution itself.

But the left will never offer any alternative agenda on the economy, the border, crime, or foreign policy.

Instead, the new Democrat-Socialist Party views the Biden disaster of 2021-2024 not as a result of his puppeteers’ toxic policies of open borders, 21 percent aggregate inflation, dead-end green energy subsidies, DEI mandates, trans fixations, and an appeasing foreign policy that led to wars abroad and emboldened China.

Instead, they now blame those catastrophic years on Biden’s own enfeebled state—as if he were merely a hapless, debilitated messenger for their otherwise superb radical message.

So absent a positive agenda, Democrats will simply run all their state and federal campaigns as if Trump, their Satanic monster, is on every ballot.

Their Trump obsessions result in three now well-worn strategies.

The first, of course, is still more chaos.

The left believes that the unending 2020 riots cost Trump the election.

Ever since, they have sought to concoct a nihilist replay—whether the Tesla hysterias, the perpetual threats of government shutdowns, tough-guy talk of open insurrection against the federal government, or the current, performative-art, anti-ICE violence in Minneapolis.

They concede most Americans still support Trump’s closed borders and legal-only immigration, but hope they want a return to “normalcy” even more.

The more violence, Nazi-invective, and sheer craziness the left can instill—storming church services, ramming ICE vehicles, taking over the streets, or boasting of armed resistance—the more they believe that voters will blame not them, the instigators, but Trump, the target of their insurrectionary madness.

In Democrats’ blinkered reckoning, voters supposedly would prefer 10,000 illegal aliens methodically and daily swarming the border instead of seeing Minneapolis in utter neo-Confederate revolt.

Second, Democrats seize on every Trump art-of-the-deal excess or coarse putdown.

They scream that narcissistic Trump’s new ballroom has wrecked the White House. Or madman Trump was on the verge of fighting our NATO brethren in Greenland. Or cruel Trump wrecked our relationship with the lovable and blameless Canadians.

Democrats grant that voters sincerely like Trump’s secure border, the new trade agreements that correct past asymmetries, a rearming NATO, a defanged Iran, and the end to Maduro’s communist thugocracy—but not Trump’s messy art-of-the-deal means to achieve those desirable ends.

They scream that Trump talked crazily of making Canada a 51st state, not that it was finally shocked into promising to pay what it owed back in NATO contributions, securing its side of the border, and addressing its massive trade surpluses with the US.

So, Trump needs to avoid the very melodramas the left wants to exploit, which detract from his own undeniable accomplishments and the Democrats’ previous disastrous record.

Third, Democrats still rely on their ossified partnerships with the media, academia, and popular culture to mouth the old talking points.

So we are told ad nauseam that Trump caused the “affordability” crisis.

Or Trump is still Putin’s puppet.

Or Trump was an Epstein groupie.

Or Trump’s trade war crashed the economy.

Behind this stale Democrat boilerplate lies a deep fear that the Nietzschean Trump, just as he beat all their lawfare ambushes, will also do the impossible and avoid losing the Congress in November.

And they should fear.

Trump’s catalysts for a booming 2026 economy are already in place.

No one can now stop massive deregulation, new tax cuts and incentives, recalibrated tariffs, unprecedented foreign investment, record energy development, and the new emerging technologies.

All that is needed before the midterms is not controversial new initiatives, but more focus on the current boom in GDP, lower inflation, and increased purchasing power—all in contrast to Biden’s inflation disaster.

Voters still support closed borders and deportations of criminals and the millions who swarmed in under Biden.

But the best way to remind them of a secure border is to concentrate on partnering with red and purple state and local law enforcement for the next few months.

Each week, the thousands of systematically deported criminals in these jurisdictions will contrast with the thousands of violent offenders who are sanctuaried and protected in failed blue states.

And without the smokescreen of the ICE psychodramas, there are a lot of Democrat fears—like the vast Somali fraud in Minnesota, the even greater welfare scandals emerging in California, and the antics and verbiage of the hard left, like Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and the herky-jerky Gavin Newsom, who turned California’s natural paradise into a manmade purgatory.

Tyler Durden Fri, 02/13/2026 - 17:00
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"An Astonishing Sign Of Cultural Decay..."

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

Sure, Take That Time-Out

“Crisis is when brittleness meets shock. “

- Yuri Bezmenov’s Ghost on X

By shutting down the government for a minimum of ten days supposedly over funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Wile E. Coyote Democratic Party is about to blow up another Acme bomb in its mangy muzzle.

I will tell you why.

First, this DHS business is just a stupid prank to bamboozle the public.

It will not shut down ICE operations, as Chuck Schumer pretends. ICE was already funded with $75-billion in last year’s Big Beautiful Bill. The shutdown will only defund the Coast Guard and airport security. (Does that sound smart?)

Second, senators will be leaving the DC swamp and going home to their states where, it turns out, polls show that voters of both parties combined overwhelmingly favor election reform by 84-percent.

The House has passed the SAVE Act onto the Senate for action, up or down. For at least ten days of the shutdown, the senators will have to explain why proving that you are a citizen to vote is a bad idea — or conversely, why allowing non-citizens to vote is a good idea. So, thanks, Democrats, for sending the senators home to face their voters.

Eventually, senators will have to return to the US Capitol and take up the SAVE Act.

The act will require proof of citizenship to register, photo ID to vote in person and for requesting an absentee ballot. The bill would prohibit universal mail-in voting, require absentee ballots be received by election day, impose a five-year prison sentence for helping anyone to register without correct documents, and provisions to clean up the states’ voter rolls.

Additional legislation still in the House, introduced by Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), would provide for Election Day only in-person voting by paper ballots, and yet other bills awaiting action would eliminate electronic vote-tallying machines. All the provisions above are common in most other civilized nations (and even a few that are not, such as Afghanistan). The Democratic Party is against all of it because they can only win national elections by deceit and chicanery.

When Senators return to DC, they will have to overcome the filibuster in its current mode, which is the silent or so-called “zombie” filibuster. You see, in the old days, before 1972, if senators wanted to filibuster, they had to actually hold the Senate floor and keep talking — bringing all Senate business to a complete halt until either they gave up or the majority could gather enough votes for cloture (ending debate). It was physically very hard on the senators, an ordeal, and to get through the hours of mindless blather, they would read the phone book, or the World Almanac, or a Sunday newspaper from page one to the obituaries, which subjected them to ridicule.

After 1972, the Senate introduced what they called “the two-track” system, which allowed the body to move on to other business under a filibuster, without requiring a member to stand and speak. All that was needed was for a senator to inform the leadership that he intended to block a vote, with the backing of 40 other senators. This led to a dramatic increase in the use of filibusters — transforming them from a rare, physically demanding gambit into a routine procedural threat.

Now, the catch is that this change in procedure was never formally voted on. Going from “talking” filibusters to “silent” filibusters didn’t happen through a deliberate decision by the full Senate to change the rules — it emerged in 1972 from a procedural workaround that then Majority Leader Mike Mansfield introduced.

It’s just a custom masquerading as a rule, and one that now Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) could declare null and void.

Doing so would bring back the old talking filibuster. Opponents of a given bill, such as the SAVE Act, would have to step into the well of Senate and offer arguments against election reform, or they could read through the Chicago phone book.

In either case, they’d expose themselves to ridicule. Perhaps those ten days at home during the present government shutdown will lead to an attitude change.

If that doesn’t do it, consider that sometime in the weeks and months ahead, you will be seeing some results from the seizure of the Fulton County, GA, 2020 voting records that took place in January. Since the FBI went in there on a warrant — meaning a judge saw probable cause of voter fraud — the country will likely be exposed to real evidence, for the first time, that one crucial swing state ran a corrupt election operation, and it will no longer be possible for the Democrats to yell that such claims are “baseless” or “debunked.”

It’s an astonishing sign of cultural decay that we are even arguing over election reform at this point.

The measures introduced during the dastardly COVID-19 trip - unlimited mail-in balloting, organized “ballot harvesting,” counting ballots for weeks after Election Day, doing so with Dominion / Smartmatic machines connectable to the Internet, and ignoring chain-of-custody requirements - were patently and obviously dishonest.

That’s what got you four years of “Joe Biden,” a walking-talking lie.

Is there anything that the Democratic Party doesn’t lie about? I’ll wait for your answer.

Tyler Durden Fri, 02/13/2026 - 16:20
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We Have Now Reached "Gunperson"-Level Absurdity

Authored by Jenna McCarthy via 'Jenna's Side Rocks' substack,

By now you’ve surely heard about Tuesday’s horrific school shooting in Tumbler Ridge—a tiny, remote Canadian town where the biggest excitement is probably a moose spotting on Nextdoor—that left nine people dead and more than two dozen injured. Monstrous would be an insult to monsters everywhere.

It’s the deadliest mass shooting Canada has seen in more than thirty years. The details are unimaginable, the community is destroyed, survivors are traumatized for life, and none of it is even remotely funny. The news coverage, however, could easily be nominated for a Primetime Emmy in the Outstanding Comedy Writing category.

Within minutes of the rampage, alerts went out describing the suspect as a “female in a dress.”

The minute I saw that, I knew.

I mean, have you ever—even once—seen an alleged perpetrator described as a “male in pants” or a “female wearing shoes?” Of course not! It’s “armed female” or “adult male” or, if the subject is still on the loose, maybe “a white male in a neon green hoodie and purple parachute pants.” But never-not-ever is it “a human in human clothing.” They only threw the dress part in there to avoid stating a politically inconvenient fact, upsetting advertisers, or toppling their own carefully constructed narrative.

By the time officials reached the podium to deliver a press briefing, the description had morphed into “a gunperson.”gunperson. As if the word “shooter” was insufficiently inclusive or somehow accidentally implied gender? The press spent more time agonizing over culturally sanitized euphemisms than reporting the actual details of the crime.

By early afternoon, every major outlet was doing verbal Pilates to avoid saying the one thing the adults in the room had already figured out: the “female in a dress” was a biological male transvestite.

Reporters tiptoed around the truth like it was a sleeping dragon. A lot of “quotes” were used.

You could practically hear the gears grinding: “If we get the pronouns wrong, we’ll be accused of hate; if we get the biology right, we’ll be called bigots. So let’s say nothing and hope nobody screenshots this.”

NOTE: I will not be mentioning the shooter’s name, showing his face, or referring to him as her or them. Linguistic autonomy. My stack, my choice.

Social media, as always, was on it. Online sleuths quickly dug up the shooter’s past, online posts, behavioral history, and hobbies—some dark, some disturbing, some tragically predictable for a young person spiraling into violence. They discovered that he was into guns, liked to wear lipstick, and described himself online as MtF, trans slang for someone making the switch from male to female. (I could probably stop there.) They found old Facebook posts written by his mother—who was allegedly one of the victims, along with one of her three other children—asking a private parenting group for advice on dealing with a child who “is angry, mean, and territorial,” “hurts his siblings” and “covers things up and lies.” They unearthed evidence that the mom was also seeking help for his ADHD diagnosis and that the killer was in fact, taking psychiatric drugs. They pointed out, time and again, that Canada has some of the strictest gun laws on the planet, a detail that somehow didn’t stop a deranged lunatic from getting his hands on a weapon and opening deadly fire. Go figure.

The actual press, it seemed, was too concerned with identity etiquette to touch any of those piddling particulars. And even long after the gunperson had been positively identified as someone who was born with XY chromosomes, they still couldn’t do it. They couldn’t bring themselves to have the journalistic decency to make it clear that the suspect was a mentally ill male who at the very, most generous best could be considered a transgender woman.

Nope, it was just woman.

What makes me mental is the media’s absolute allergy to stating the obvious. They refuse to report basic facts because those specifics implicate the very experiment they’ve helped unleash on America’s kids: destabilizing their identities, medicating their emotions, indulging their self-delusion, and then ignoring any possible connection when the result is deadly violence.

The media has a line they will repeat until the sun burns out: “Trans people are far less likely than cis men to commit mass shootings.”

You’ll see it on every network, on every chyron, and in every sanctimonious “actually” thread on X.

And technically, it’s true—but only because they cheat.

The stats they cite routinely fold every gun catastrophe in America into one giant pile: gang shootings, drug-turf shootouts, domestic murders, felonies gone bad, suicides, robberies, drive-bys, and the occasional drunk uncle with a Glock. If you use the standard media definition of “mass shooting”—four or more people shot in a single incident—then yes, trans-identifying shooters make up a tiny slice. So do dentists, redheads, and people named Gary.

But that’s not the category anyone conjures when they hear the phrase mass shooter. 

We’re talking about public, ideological, spectacle violence—school shootings, mall massacres, club attacks, manifesto-fueled rampages, the “society broke me and now I’m returning the favor” genre. And when you look at those, the ones that shock the nation and lead to “serious national conversations,” a different pattern emerges—one the media pretends not to see.

Out of roughly 150–185 public mass shooters since the 1960s (depending on the database), at least five have been trans, “gender-nonconforming,” or nonbinary. That’s around 3%—and doesn’t include this week’s carnage—in a population where trans-identified people comprise about one percent. In other words: the trans community represents triple the baseline. And if you zoom in on the last decade, when the gender ideology movement hit full throttle, the number jumps to 7%.

It gets worse. If you narrow the subset further to school shooters only—using the standard definition to include non-gang, non-accidental, multiple targeted victims—and suddenly 10% of the perpetrators in the last decade (two out of twenty) have identified as transgender. And if you look at just the past five years, when five of ten shooters were trans—this time, I’m including this week’s horror—that number skyrockets to fifty percent. But nothing to see here, folks. Trust us.

Of course, this doesn’t prove causation. But what it absolutely disproves is the media’s favorite bedtime story: that it’s “baseless” or “bigoted” to notice a recurring theme. It isn’t. The pattern is real, documented, and growing. Yet the folks whose entire job it is to inform us will continue to chant their mantra that “trans people are far less violent than toxic cisgender men”—because they’d rather gargle broken glass than admit the monster under the bed is one they had a hand in feeding.

And I shouldn’t have to say it, but I will: facts matter. Trends matter. Truth matters. Because institutions can’t solve a problem they refuse to see, and you can’t have a public reckoning when half the country is duct-taping their mouths shut to protect an ideological narrative.

Change my mind.

Tyler Durden Thu, 02/12/2026 - 16:20
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Epstein's Island And The Gateway To The Psychology Of Evil

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

Conspiracy theorists are almost always right. We have been proved right time and time again and we will continue to be right about many things that the corporate media used to call “fringe.” For those out there who are like me; people who have been trying to warn the public about these threats for 20 years or more, I just want to say: We have won a resounding victory. We brought the dark secrets of the elites into the mainstream and there’s nothing that can stop this train now.

However, the fight is far from over and don’t expect anyone to give you any awards or even recognition. It’s the nature of our work, and frankly, the best thing that can happen in the long run is that researchers and analysts like us eventually become obsolete. In the meantime, the infowar to save civilization continues.

One issue I have spearheaded in my career (along with a handful of other liberty writers) is delving into the psychology and ideology of the globalists. I find their existence to be fascinating. Revolting to be sure, but also fascinating.

The theory which I have held for two decades is that the globalists are first and foremost an occult network of organized psychopaths. Meaning, they seek out people with psychopathic traits (latent or otherwise) in order to recruit and grow their numbers. The common assumption in the general public is that psychopaths are supposed to operate in isolation; that they do not work together because they are too self absorbed to organize.

History shows us that this is simply not so.

From the Mafia, to violent drug cartels, to religious cults, to authoritarian governments, we have seen psychopaths congregate together and cooperate in the worst moments of our timeline.

They do it for mutual gain, but I believe there is an agenda that goes well beyond that.

It’s a far reaching conspiracy which the recent release of the Epstein Files seems to support.

To be clear, I think the information presented so far in the files barely scratches the surface of the evil we are dealing with. I also think it’s important to point out that people being “named” in the Epstein Files is meaningless without context.

Some public figures like Donald Trump or Elon Musk are “named” as interacting with Epstein but there is zero evidence that they participated in anything nefarious (Epstein approached ANYONE with power or influence and tried to recruit them). Furthermore, anonymous FBI tips from random weirdos do not make a criminal case. Others are named in the files and the context suggests that they have done some pretty disgusting things.

The files represent enough evidence to justify a massive international investigation, they do not represent proof of crimes that would hold up in a court of law (at least, not so far).

We may actually never see indictments of any Epstein Island regulars. As I noted in my article “Governmental Self-Preservation: Why We’ll Never See The Real Epstein List”, published last year, I do think there are many people in the Trump Administration that want to see the Epstein case lead to arrests. However, I also predicted that the revelations within the files could trigger even darker discoveries that might cause total collapse.

The people handling this info are faced with a conundrum: Pursue the light of truth, dump it all on the internet and risk full blown societal chaos, or, drip feed info to the public and try to keep the system from imploding. Forget about aliens from outer space – The disclosure of concrete proof that a luciferian cult of baby eating bankers, CEOs, politicians and bureaucrats controls the planet is the real Black Swan event.

One cannot have a meaningful discussion about the nature of power in modern civilization (post-industrial revolution) without accepting the cold hard reality that most of the key events in our recent history have been manipulated by a hidden consortium of elites. We also can’t have any legitimate debate about how to solve the problem without accepting the fact that “evil” is an undeniable constant.

It’s the common denominator, the key to the equation.

Evil is a tangible and autonomous entity that the wields influence over human society, often using people with inherent weaknesses of the soul as vessels for achieving its machinations. Yes, that sounds rather biblical, but I would argue that our religious ancestors might have had a much better grasp on the nature of evil than we do today given our futurist propensity to deny anything we can’t immediately explain with science.

The Epstein Files suggests an evil that’s beyond reckoning for many people who have never been exposed to research on globalism, and even those who have been exposed might find themselves shocked by the discoveries.

To summarize, Jeffery Epstein was not the top of the pyramid. He was also not some self serving flim-flam man selling sex and depravity just to gain access to the halls of power. Rather, Epstein was a middle-man, a drug dealer selling dopamine experiences as a reward for members of the cabal (while collecting blackmail materials). But the cabal is far bigger than what we see in the Epstein files and it supersedes any one nation or government.

There are strange mentions of “cloning”, baby farming for black market sales, and the creation of a “superior race” in the files. In other words, the interests of Epstein and his associates went well beyond sexual fetishes.

Some of the Epstein emails openly discuss sexual abuse and torture of victims brought to the island. The victimization of teens is less protected and easier to prove. Then, there’s the creepier elements of the files. Coded language is rampant within the Epstein emails, using food as symbols for clearly illicit contraband.

From the Pizzagate information (the John Podesta emails) released by Wikileaks in 2016, we can see that food code words are common for the globalists and seem to be tied to the abuse of young children. Pizza symbolism has been common within pedophilia networks for many years leading up to the exposure of Pizzagate, and it’s also common within the pages of the Epstein Files (the word “pizza” is used as code at least 900 times in the emails).

The use of “beef jerky” in the Epstein emails (also mentioned hundreds of times) is specifically disconcerting, including talk of keeping the “jerky on ice”, a strange obsession with jerky portion weights, lab testing of “jerky” to prevent sickness, etc. Whatever they are talking about, it’s not beef jerky. You have to ask yourself, what kind of edible product would be so criminal that it has to be hidden behind elaborate code-speak?

The obvious conclusion would be that “jerky” is code for human meat. Some might argue that there’s no benefits to eating human meat so why would the elites do it? These critics are operating from a logical perspective and not an occultist perspective. One cannot separate Epstein Island from occultism and still understand what happened there.

For the elites who link themselves back to the pagan practices of ancient Babylonian times, from the era of Molech worshipers (Bohemian Grove) and beyond, the ritual of cannibalism is integral to their religion. They believe that human sacrifice gives them power and this is a common thread within most pagan systems including satanism.

Luciferianism/satanism is an integral element of globalism. The evidence of its practice within globalist circles is immense and cannot be ignored. Some skeptics would denote a separation between “satanism” and “luciferianism”, but for all intents and purposes they are intertwined belief systems.

Satanists are occupied with the pursuit of pleasure at the expense of morality, while luciferians are occupied with the pursuit of power and godhood at the expense of morality. For adherents of both practices, their motto is “Do What Thou Wilt.”

As I outlined in my article “Luciferianism: A Secular Look At A Destructive Globalist Belief System”, published in 2019, global elitists derive their spiritual ecstasy from the worship of the material and the corruption of the pure. They seek to deconstruct creation and human nature, to prove that all people are as depraved as they are and that morality is an artificial limitation on power and pleasure.

Their system is rife with psychopathic indicators and I assert that luciferienism is a religion designed specifically to affirm the destructive tendencies of psychopaths and narcopaths. But what are these tendencies?

Psychopaths lack any sense of empathy and function only as parasites who feed on the rest of humanity. This is actually one of the reasons I’m fascinated by them. Not because they are particularly interesting as individuals, but because their existence seems to be a dangerous anomaly. They are less than 1% of the total human population but they cause the vast majority of human tragedies.

The average person has the capacity for evil, there’s no doubt.

People can be driven to all kinds of horrors depending on their circumstances.

But, the majority of us have a mechanism called “conscience” which stops us from committing evil most of the time. It also causes us to feel guilt when we know we have acted in a destructive manner.

If the majority of the population did not have a universal experience of conscience and morality, we would have gone extinct as a species thousands of years ago.

Globalists (psychopaths) do not have this mechanism. In fact, they view conscience as a hindrance, a trait of the weak and the easily victimized. They are a predatory class of human. I would even suggest that they are not human at all, but a mutation or a cancerous intrusion.

When psychopaths achieve overt material wealth they then have easy access to the resources they need to satisfy their impulses at will. At this stage in the evolution of a psychopath they have a tendency to become bored. They begin to chase increasing depravity and darkness in search of a greater dopamine fix. The more degenerate and taboo the activity, the more exciting it is.

But these are nothing but individual motivations and personal addictions. What are the ambitions and drives of the organized cabal?

Part of the allure of occultism is the glee some people feel when they believe they are “superior” to their common man. Occult groups sell their members on the notion that they will be set apart as “elite” when they join with the keepers of secrets.

When we read the numerous emails tied to Epstein as well as his island and his ranch in New Mexico, the people who correspond with him seem childish and giddy. They snicker like adolescent brats when they engage in codes and riddles. They’re committing atrocities beyond the comprehension of the average man, and they feel joy because they’re basking in the “cloak and dagger” of it all.

I think this might be a hard thing to reconcile for many people in the conspiracy field, but the cabal is not made up of darkly brilliant minds imposing cold and calculating will. Rather, it is mostly made up of egomaniacal narcissists giggling like retards as they revel in their delusions of grandeur. If you saw how these people behave behind the scenes, you would probably feel embarrassed for them and feel like an idiot for imagining them to be cunning or untouchable masterminds.

Without their money and the collective protection of their coven, they are tiny people without merit living a meaningless existence. That said, make no mistake – It’s the putrid sociopathy of their childishness that makes them exceedingly dangerous. To be infantile while rejoicing in the blood of innocence requires a diabolical and demonic mind.

From my research Epstein’s Island might have been tame in comparison to some of the other meeting places of the elites. His island was not the end destination but a gateway for initiates. I believe the island was a test, a venue where evil is concentrated and people with apprehensions are filtered away.

The worst of the worst likely moved on to even more vile nesting grounds hidden in plain site around the world. The reason the Epstein Files matter is because they open the door to a wider investigation of the globalist networks and their horrific playgrounds.

I suggest that we need to bring back the concept of “witch hunters”; people who are able to think like occultists while using modern investigative methods in order to track down these networks and erase them from the Earth. If government officials refuse to do this, then vigilantism is inevitable.

Unfortunately, it’s no mistake that globalist NGOs have flooded the west with third world migrants and mobilized armies of far left insurgents in the past few years. After the pandemic they know that the public is reaching information saturation and that their agenda is coming to light. They will seek to overthrow conservative movements, exploit useful idiots to destroy their enemies and cause general mayhem in order to sabotage any organized resistance.

If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch.  Learn more about it HERE.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Wed, 02/11/2026 - 16:20
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US Consumer Debt Delinquencies Soar To Highest Since 2017 While Office Delinquencies Hit Record High

It will come as a surprise to exactly nobody that the Fed's latest quarterly Household Debt and Credit report (for Q4 2025) reported total household debt balances increased by $191 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, a 1% rise from 2025 Q3, to a new all-time high. Balances now stand at $18.8 trillion and have increased by $4.6 trillion since the end of 2019, just before the pandemic recession. 

This is how various debt balances changed through the quarter: 

  • Mortgage balances shown on consumer credit reports grew by $98 billion during the fourth quarter of 2025 and totaled $13.17 trillion at the end of December.
  • Balances on home equity lines of credit (HELOC) rose by $12 billion, the 15th consecutive quarterly increase.There is now $433 billion in outstanding HELOC balances, $116 billion above the low reached in 2022Q1. In total, non-housing balances increased by $81 billion, a 1.6% increase from 2025Q3.
  • Credit card balances rose by $44 billion during the fourth quarter and now total $1.28 trillion outstanding, up 5.5% since last year.
  • Student loan balances increased by $11 billion and now stand at $1.66 trillion.
  • Auto loan balances edged up by $12 billion to $1.66 trillion.
  • Other balances, which include retail cards and consumer finance loans, rose by $14 billion and now total $564 billion.

New debt originations were also solid in the quarter:

  • The volume of mortgage originations, which includes both refinance and purchase originations, increased with $524 billion newly originated in 2025 Q4, an uptick from the $512 billion seen in the previous quarter. It was the highest since 2022 when rates were far lower. 

  • There were $181 billion in new auto loans and leases appearing on credit reports during the fourth quarter, a small dip from the $184 billion observed in 2025 Q3.

  • Aggregate limits on credit cards continued to rise, with a $95 billion (1.6%) uptick in the fourth quarter.
  • Home equity lines of credit (HELOC) limits rose by $25 billion (2.5%), continuing an expansion in HELOC limits that began in 2022.

  • Credit quality of newly originated mortgages held steady, while auto loans loosened slightly. The median credit score for new mortgage originations was 775 in 2025Q4, unchanged from 2025 Q3 while the tenth percentile declined from 660 to 650. For auto loans, the median credit score edged down, from 724 to 716. 

Taking a closer look at some of the negative changes below the surface, delinquency rates on loans ranging from mortgages to credit cards rose to 4.8% of all outstanding US household debt in the fourth quarter, up 0.3% sine Q3 2025 and the highest level since 2017, driven by higher defaults among low-income and young borrowers.

As Bloomberg notes, while the overall share of loans in some stage of default is near pre-pandemic averages, the rise in delinquencies among the lowest earners adds to evidence of an increasingly K-shaped economy, and nowhere was it more obvious than in the case of student loans - where with the Biden repayment moratorium has been over for the past year - we have seen a tsunami of both early delinquencies, with 16.3% of student-loan debt became delinquent in Q4 the biggest increase on record in data going back to 2004...

... and serious delinquencies (effectively defaults)...

... led by 50+ year-old "students" (almost certainly of the liberal major, blue-haired anti-ICE, variety).

The rise in defaults was also driven by delinquencies in mortgage payments, and New York Fed researchers found that they were particularly high in lower income zip codes.


“As household debt levels grow modestly, mortgage delinquencies continue to increase,” said Wilbert van der Klaauw, an economic research advisor at the New York Fed, said in a press release accompanying the figures. “Delinquency rates for mortgages are near historically normal levels, but the deterioration is concentrated in lower-income areas and in areas with declining home prices.”

The increased struggle in low-income and young borrowers’ ability to pay their loans is consistent with elevated unemployment rates among some parts of the population, the NY Fed researchers added. The jobless rate for workers 16 to 24 years old stood at 10.4% in December, near the highest levels since the depths of the pandemic in 2021, and largely the result of AI disruption. 

But if the Fed is concerned about the soaring debt delinquencies now, just wait  a few years until a third of all jobs are replaced by hallucinating chat bots, and the overall unemployment rate is 15%, something we discussed earlier. At that point the question will not be whether Kevin Warsh will shrink the balance sheet - he never will - but whether the coming Universal Basic Income money printing will be measured in the trillions or quadrillions. 

But wait, there's more: because chatbot algos do not need an office - and the workers they displace no longer need an office - the spiked in post-covid office defaults is back, and according to commercial real estate specialist Trepp, the CMBS delinquency rate increased again in
January 2026, climbing 17 basis points to a record 7.47%.

The increase was driven by a net increase in delinquent loans of almost $1.6 billion, primarily driven by the office sector.  For the second straight month, three of the five major property types saw increases to their delinquency rates, while two pulled back, although the mix was different in January.

The largest rate increase was in office, which rose 103 basis points to an all-time high of 12.34%. The previous high was 11.76% back in October last year. The second largest rate increase was multifamily’s, which seesawed back up by 30 basis points in January to 6.94%, following a decrease of similar magnitude of 34 basis points the month prior.

January’s balance of newly delinquent loans totaled just under $5.4 billion, while over $2.6 billion of delinquent loans cured over the same period, and $1.1 billion of delinquent loans paid off, resulting in a net delinquency increase of about $1.6 billion.

The office sector was the largest net contributor to the increase in the delinquency rate, while a large lodging loan that cured in January helped to offset some of the increase in the headline delinquency rate.

It gets worse: if we were to include loans that are beyond their maturity date but current on interest (delinquency status of performing matured balloon), the delinquency rate would be 9.14%, up 39 basis points from December. That is also 167 basis points higher than the headline rate of 7.47%, highlighting ongoing maturity-related stress.

Bottom line: at some point the AI revolution may well lead to a productivity revolution, but to get there the US will first go through a mass layoff wave, resulting in tens if not hundreds of millions of layoffs (a 15% unemployment rate to go with the 15% growth rate), coupled with a historic debt crisis and a collapse in virtually every commercial real estate sector while Blackstone buys up all the residential real estate it has had its eyes on for the past decade. 

Tyler Durden Tue, 02/10/2026 - 15:45
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