"Zero Hormuz": Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Readies Tens Of Billions To Turn Fujairah Into Hormuz Bypass

 On March 3, just days after the first US and Israeli strikes on Iran, when most of the market was still busy pricing the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as a temporary inconvenience, we pointed out something that seemed rather obvious (to us): the UAE's oil port of Fujairah, which sits on the Gulf of Oman and bypasses the strait completely, was far too small for its strategic importance - and that would change.

Six days later we went one step further:

Seven months later, the "major infrastructure push" has a name, a sponsor, and a checkbook. According to a new Bloomberg Big Take, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed Al Nahyan - who took the helm of the emirate's $300 billion L'imad Holding sovereign fund weeks before the war began - is now the point man for what the UAE is officially calling its "Zero Hormuz" strategy (wonder if he was reading Zero Hedge at the time). And the centerpiece of that strategy is, you guessed it, Fujairah.

Follow the money (to the Gulf of Oman)

Here are the Bloomberg report highlights:

• L'imad has announced plans to take Abu Dhabi Ports Co. private at a valuation of nearly $9 billion, and people familiar say the fund is now likely to spend tens of billions of dollars more on new port infrastructure outside the strait.
• The crown prince and his inner circle are expected to be "particularly focused" on expanding ports in Fujairah, which sits just outside Hormuz and opens into the Gulf of Oman.
• In May, L'imad struck an agreement with BlackRock (via its Global Infrastructure Partners unit), Temasek and ADNOC to jointly target up to $30 billion of infrastructure investment in energy transportation, logistics and water. Abu Dhabi did not want such a large push funded solely by state money - which is a polite way of saying Larry Fink gets a toll road around Iran.
• Sheikh Khaled also chairs the executive committee of ADNOC's board, which is building a second oil pipeline to double export capacity through Fujairah; at a May meeting he directed the company to accelerate delivery.
• Meanwhile Dubai's DP World is separately pushing new container terminals in Fujairah - meaning that a relatively small stretch of coastline under the Al Hajar mountains is about to become some of the most crowded (and most valuable) real estate in the Gulf.

The UAE's trade minister Thani Al Zeyoudi summed up the doctrine back in June: the country wants to move to Zero Hormuz dependency regardless of whether the strait is open or not. Translation: even if Tehran signs a peace deal tomorrow, the leverage it enjoyed over Gulf exports for decades is never coming back.

Regular readers will recognize every step of this progression. On April 2 we noted that Gulf states were dusting off costly bypass pipeline plans; on May 15 we reported that ADNOC would double its crude export capacity bypassing Hormuz with the new pipeline to Fujairah, due in 2027; and on July 13 we wrote that DP World's plan for a new east coast port in Fujairah "signals the beginning of the end" of Iran's Hormuz leverage. That same day, as peace talks went nowhere, we also offered an alternative engineering solution:

Abu Dhabi, it appears, has opted for the slightly less ambitious version: pipelines plus a lot of concrete.

Goldman: 60% of Gulf exports insulated from Hormuz by 2028

So how far can this go? Goldman's commodity team (Alexandra Paulus, Yulia Grigsby, Daan Struyven and Filippo Cuscito) ran the numbers in a July note titled "Gulf Exports: Short-Term Uncertainty, Long-Term Pipeline Hedge" (available here to pro subs), and the conclusion is that while Hormuz still dictates prices in the short run, the long run looks very different. The bank estimates that enough pipeline capacity will be added in the region to insulate over 45% of pre-war Persian Gulf exports by end-2027 and more than 60% by end-2028 from any future Hormuz shock.

Some of the details:

• Goldman measures current effective bypass capacity as the flows out of Yanbu (East-West pipeline), Fujairah (ADCOP pipeline) and Ceyhan (Kirkuk-Ceyhan). In its base case, that capacity rises by 3.8mb/d by end-2027 and 7.3mb/d cumulatively by end-2028, to over 14mb/d - versus ~23mb/d of pre-war exports from the seven Gulf producers that need pipelines to dodge Hormuz.
• The UAE features prominently: the West-East pipeline (ADNOC's second line to Fujairah) is one of only two projects already under construction, while a Hamriyah-Fujairah pipeline sits in Goldman's "Accelerated Scenario" - which would insulate 75% of exports by end-2028 (vs. just over 45% in the "Conservative Scenario").
• History is on the builders' side: across Goldman's sample, the median construction time for Mideast pipelines was 2.5 years, and single-country projects get built faster, especially in response to supply disruptions. Multi-country projects (looking at you, Iraq-Syria) not so much.
• Total cost across the seven projects: roughly $30-48 billion - or, put differently, about one BlackRock/L'imad infrastructure platform.

And here is the punchline for oil bulls: Goldman raised its long-dated Brent assumption (3-year-ahead futures) by $9 to $76/bbl at the peak of the war, mostly on a higher structural security premium. But the bank warns that the eventual expansion of bypass capacity poses downside risk to that long-dated assumption. In other words, every barrel that Sheikh Khaled routes to Fujairah is a barrel of risk premium Iran can no longer charge the world.

The plumbing is already working

The "adaptation" is already visible in the export data. As we reported earlier today, Goldman estimates that Persian Gulf oil exports (including "dark exports") recovered to 23.3mb/d over the past week, in line with their 2025 average, after doubling in September. Crude accounted for nearly 90% of the recovery, reaching 19mb/d (108% of the 2025 average), while refined product exports remain stuck at about half of normal. Crucially for this story, Goldman notes that oil exports from the UAE - which shockingly exited OPEC shortly after the Iran war started - are also above their 2025 average, "with likely further upside" - while Iran shipped no crude by sea at all in September.

Drill down and Fujairah is doing a lot of the heavy lifting: Goldman's late-September breakdown puts flows via Fujairah at 3.6mb/d (crude, products and LPG combined), more than Yanbu's 2.6mb/d, and more than double the ~1.7mb/d Fujairah handled before the war.

Source: Goldman

And by country, the UAE is already running at 110% of its 2025 export average - second only to Saudi Arabia's dark-transit-fueled surge - while Iran sits at 19%.

Source: Goldman

The UAE in particular has been the most creative workaround artist of the war: as we noted in July, its crude output hit an all-time high of 4.1mb/d in June after it quit OPEC, with ADNOC selling cargoes for loading off Fujairah and Sohar, outside the strait. Back in March, we reported that Fujairah crude loadings had already hit ~1.9mb/d - about the max the existing 1.5-1.8mb/d Habshan-Fujairah line can carry. The only real constraint was pipe. Which is exactly what Abu Dhabi is now paying to fix.

Bypassing the strait is not the same as bypassing the drones

None of this makes Fujairah safe. It is roughly 80 miles from Hormuz and well within range of Iranian drones and short-range missiles - a point LSE professor Steffen Hertog makes in the Bloomberg piece. Tehran knows exactly what Fujairah represents: the port was in flames on March 14, was attacked at least seven times in the first four weeks of the war, and on March 31 Iran explicitly threatened to target the port and its pipeline "in order to close the UAE's route to bypass the Strait of Hormuz." On May 4, another Iranian strike on Fujairah's oil zone sent Brent above $114.

Saudi Arabia offers the cautionary tale. Its 7mb/d East-West pipeline to Yanbu - the region's single biggest Hormuz bypass - was shut down on September 11 after drone attacks by pro-Iran militias, before restarting on September 28. Goldman's September 14 Oil Tracker pointed out that an April strike on the same pipeline cut flows by just 0.7mb/d for four days, while the latest attack was far more severe and threatened the remaining ~2mb/d of Yanbu exports. The Saudis promptly pivoted back to shipping through... Hormuz. Meanwhile the Houthis are advancing on Bab el-Mandeb, threatening the other end of the Red Sea route.

Which brings us to Treasury Secretary Bessent, who predicted on September 1 that in two years Hormuz will be "a worthless piece of water." Qatar's energy minister promptly called that "completely wrong" - which is easy to understand when you are Qatar, have no geographic alternative route, and have watched your gas revenue drop sharply. The truth is somewhere in between: Hormuz won't be worthless, but if Goldman's math is right it will be worth a lot less to Iran - and a lot more to whoever owns the ports on the other side of the mountains.

As Chatham House's Sanam Vakil puts it, a "No Hormuz" policy is now of utmost importance for the UAE - but with Iran's proxies extending their reach, Abu Dhabi will also have to prepare for infrastructure targeting outside Hormuz too. Expect the next line item in the L'imad budget to be air defense.

For now, the bottom line is the one we flagged on day four of the war: the Gulf's most important real estate is no longer inside the strait, it's on the Gulf of Oman - and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi has just put tens of billions of dollars (and BlackRock's money) behind that view.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/zero-hormuz-abu-dhabi-crown-prince-readies-tens-billions-turn-fujairah-hormuz-bypass

China’s Tencent leases 100,000 chips from Oracle to accelerate AI push

 

Tencent has signed its largest overseas lease deal with US cloud provider Oracle as the Chinese tech giant strives to catch up.

https://www.ft.com/content/8799b33d-f07c-4a03-82f0-bf5d3d1d29e9

Yemen's army reports 468 operations against Houthis

 The Yemeni Armed Forces announced that military operations targeting Houthi militia personnel and equipment across multiple fronts resulted in hundreds of casualties, according to the Media Center of Yemeni Armed Forces.

"The Armed Forces executed 468 targeting operations against Houthis militia personnel & equipment on AlBayda & Al-Mansoura in Al-Wazi'iyah fronts," a military spokesman stated.

The spokesman added that these strikes left "hundreds killed & wounded, alongside destruction of military vehicles & equipment."

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Yemen's-army-reports-468-operations-against-Houthis/67210762

Kataib Hezbollah announces halt to military activities after US withdrawal

 

Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah announced Wednesday that its fighters would halt military activities following the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, while leaving open an exception for aircraft it considers hostile, the Associated Press reported.

Kataib Hezbollah leader Ahmad al-Hamidawi called on the group’s fighters to suspend military operations “with the exception of targeting hostile aircraft violating the country’s airspace,” according to the report.

The announcement came after the last US troops left Iraq, completing Washington’s withdrawal under an agreement with Baghdad.

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of Iran-backed militias, said talks with the government over regulating weapons had not resulted in an agreement and that it was “not bound by any timeline or agreement” announced by the government or political groups.

Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has said weapons should be brought under state control, but several powerful Iran-backed factions have resisted disarmament.

Kataib Hezbollah is an Iran-backed Iraqi Shia armed group that the United States designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 2009.

https://www.iranintl.com/en/202610019352

Netanyahu says too early to link Iran to flydubai attack

 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday it was too early to determine whether Iran was involved in the attack aboard a flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv.

“Well, it’s too early to say,” Netanyahu told Fox News when asked whether there was any indication of Iranian involvement.

“The attacking pilot is now being investigated in Saudi Arabia,” Netanyahu said, adding that he believed the suspect would be taken to the United Arab Emirates and that Israel could also participate in the investigation.

“It’s no secret that Iran wants to target Israelis abroad, wants to target Israel here,” Netanyahu said.

He said Israel had also seen signs from Iran’s proxies of plans to carry out attacks, specifically citing Hamas and Hezbollah ahead of Israel’s elections.

“We have clear evidence of that,” Netanyahu said. “But I think that whether or not this was carried out as part of that plan, that we don’t know yet.”

EXCLUSIVE: Sean Hannity presses Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on whether Iran could be connected to the attack aboard the Israel-bound Flydubai flight.

HANNITY: "Is there any indication as of now of any Iranian involvement in this incident?"

NETANYAHU: "It's too… pic.twitter.com/kSAYMedmU5

— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 1, 2026

https://www.iranintl.com/en/202610019352

Tech CEOs said to question Amodei about AI warnings

 Artificial intelligence (AI) industry leaders, including Nvidia's Jensen Huang, questioned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on his warnings about the dangers of the technology, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

AI executives asked Amodei why he was being so extreme in public about AI capabilities and risks, following a lunch in the White House East Room on Tuesday, the report said. Amodei responded by highlighting the importance of honesty with the public about model capabilities and not playing down risks.

The conversation took place with a smaller group of executives and White House aides and advisers in the Roosevelt Room, the report added.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Tech-CEOs-said-to-question-Amodei-about-AI-warnings/67210609

OpenAI said to pull back on pledged $25M to AI super PAC

 OpenAI President Greg Brockman has decided to pull back from a second $25 million donation he pledged to give to Leading the Future, a political group seeking to elect pro-AI members of Congress, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Brockman and his wife made the first $25 million donation to the super PAC last September, pledging to give the same amount again in 2026. But Brockman told employees in June that he had no plans to go through with the second donation, the report said, citing a person familiar with the matter.

In the message, Brockman acknowledged that the move, which was criticized by OpenAI employees, created a distraction, according to the report.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/OpenAI-said-to-pull-back-on-pledged-dollar25M-to-AI-super-PAC/67210944

Rubio said to have ordered Iran delegation to leave US

 United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered that Iran's delegation to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) leave the US on Monday after talks stalled, Axios reported, citing a US official and a second source with knowledge of the matter.

"Secretary Rubio kicked out the Iranian delegation who had overstayed their welcome. The UN General Assembly was over, so it was time for them to go," the unnamed official said.

The ordered delegation included Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Rubio-said-to-have-ordered-Iran-delegation-to-leave-US/67210890

When Russia Bombs The Cloud, The Kill Chain Moves Onboard

 by Oliver Martin

Drone waves starting Sept. 23 hit data centers and provider gear across the capital — UTELS, Pavutyna, Cosmonova, Datagroup, MiroHost among them. Ukraine’s Digital Transformation Ministry put household outages after the first night near 100,000. TV channels went dark. Hosting shops counted wrecked racks. On Sept. 27, a strike hit Kyivstar’s headquarters; Moscow also claimed a Vodafone Ukraine data center. Russia’s Defense Ministry named New-Telco and United DC as targets, and said they carried Defense Ministry and security-service traffic. President Zelensky answered with orders to harden data centers and critical communications.

Call it civilian infrastructure if you like. Call it military cloud if you prefer Moscow’s version. On a battlefield that runs targeting software, annotated strike video, and AI terminal guidance through the same pipes that stream news and bank apps, the distinction is a press release, not a firewall.

That is the real story under the rubble. Ukraine has spent four years turning itself into the world’s live laboratory for military artificial intelligence. Russia has noticed. If you can’t jam every FPV link and you can’t match every cheap drone, you go after the racks that train the models, route the traffic, and keep the digital kill chain warm. Knock out enough of that stack, and the answer is not peace. It is more autonomy on the wing — the onboard module that finishes the strike when the radio, or the data center, goes dark.

The racks are the new munitions plant

The Institute for the Study of War described Moscow’s mid-September shift as a hunt for “alternative defeat mechanisms” after battlefield setbacks: hit the digital nervous system when the front will not break. Providers reported damaged core gear, dead power, and half-networks offline. Cosmonova was hit more than once; MiroHost said a Ukrainian data center housing its kit was destroyed. Datagroup said services kept running from backup sites after a Friday strike Moscow claimed was used by Ukrainian military intelligence.

None of that requires believing every Russian claim about which cabinet held MoD traffic. It only requires noticing that Ukraine’s combat AI stack — DELTA battle management, annotated strike archives, AI guidance modules — rides commercial and dual-use infrastructure. When the pipes burn, the war does not pause. The kill chain migrates onto the munition.

Hands off the stick

Kyiv still insists a human makes the kill decision. The procurement paperwork is already arguing otherwise.

On Sept. 8, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence and the Brave1 cluster put seven AI guidance makers through a single scenario: fly two kilometers, lock a moving armored target from at least 500 meters, then finish the strike with the pilot’s hands off the controls. Six passed and were recommended for procurement. The ministry’s own release says successful AI-guided strikes have risen tenfold since the start of the year, and that more than 70 AI and computer-vision systems are already in the force. In the same breath, it repeats the ethics line: artificial intelligence helps; a human still decides.

That formula thins out fast once electronic warfare or distance cuts the FPV link. Ukrainian operators already use last-mile autonomy for exactly that failure mode — the onboard module takes over, locks the target, and completes the run. A Ukrainian Ministry of Defence adviser on loitering munitions put the destination in plain language in July: navigation, search, and attack will be fully autonomous. Yaroslav Azhnyuk, whose firm builds autonomy software for unmanned vehicles, told Al Jazeera the race is not to demo one clever drone; it is to make autonomy cheap and deployable across tens or hundreds of thousands of systems within months.

Russia is already there

Russia is not waiting for Western seminars to settle the point. Investigators examining a July strike in Zaporizhzhia reported a Molniya-style drone carrying a commercial Nvidia Jetson module, with no antenna for a remote pilot — the first documented Russian kill attributed to a fully autonomous attack drone. Three civilians died, including a young student. Nvidia says it does not sell the module to Moscow. Dual-use plastic does not care who signed the end-user certificate.

Moscow is also fielding its Svod tactical awareness complex while Ukraine scales DELTA, the battle-management system that feeds the same kind of sensor and image data now prized by allies. Reports of a 2024 Ukrainian “Terminator” mode test — drones searching and striking without a human in the final loop — have already surfaced in open analysis. Whether every claim holds, the direction of travel is not subtle.

Allies want the gold dust

Britain just signed for first-partner access to Ukraine’s Avengers AI Labs — millions of annotated battlefield frames — so London can train swarm models of its own. The UK Ministry of Defence is inviting up to a dozen British firms to use the platform for drone-swarm AI that keeps working when communications or GPS die. Data is anonymized, delayed, and not downloadable, officials say. The archive is still the prize. Defense News called it the first time Kyiv opened the machine-learning infrastructure itself to an outside government, after August’s partnership signed by Zelensky and Britain’s prime minister in Kyiv.

The gold dust is the combat archive. The racks in Kyiv are where that archive lives until someone copies it offshore. Bomb the cloud and you do not shut the laboratory down. You force the laboratory onto the munition — and onto whoever already has a copy.

The policy question

That is the load-bearing risk Western officials keep soft-selling. A model weight does not need a fiber run back to a Kyiv data center once it has been trained. An instructor can teach a targeting stack in a hangar and fly home. A last-mile module can finish a strike after the pilot’s radio dies, whether the cause is Russian jamming or a Shahed through a Cosmonova roof. End-use rules written for Javelins do not automatically follow a fine-tuned detector, and “human in the loop” does not mean much when the loop ends at the edge of the jammer’s bubble.

Kateryna Bondar of CSIS has said the quiet part in open coverage of the autonomy race: cheap FPV cameras and bad weather make it easier to tell a bus from a tank than a combatant from a civilian. When units delegate the finish to imperfect software, the question is not whether AI is “assisting.” It is who owns the mistake when the model completes the run.

Treat combat-trained weights and the racks that host them like the munitions they have become, or admit that Russia’s week of data-center strikes is the logical next move in a war already fought by software. Demand that allies hard-separate military AI pipelines from commercial hosting, write real rules for hands-off terminal guidance, and stop selling the public a pilot who is no longer on the stick.

The danger is not that Russia hit a few internet providers in Kyiv. The danger is that the kill chain has already moved onboard — and the cloud was only the first target it needed to leave behind.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/when-russia-bombs-the-cloud-the-kill-chain-moves-onboard/

The Death Of Neutrality When A Free Society Demands That Everyone Take A Side

 We all know what happened with Ed Sheeran and Macklemore. Macklemore brought his politics onto the stage, controversy followed, and the dispute eventually spilled beyond the concert itself. Sheeran, who had wanted his concerts to be about music, unity and humanity rather than politics, found himself addressing the Gaza conflict from the stage.

The details are everywhere. They aren't really the point.

One concertgoer, Hillary Steinberg, explained why she had returned her Ed Sheeran tickets and attended a protest instead. “I think all art is political, and all music is political,” she told the Associated Press. She went further, saying that Sheeran's decision not to take the political position she wanted him to take was itself a political choice.

There it is.

What interests me is what happened to the space between taking a side and refusing to take one. That space is getting harder to occupy, and the consequences reach well beyond a concert tour.

We are increasingly being asked to declare ourselves. Political identity has seeped into entertainment, employment, universities, corporations, professional organizations, and ordinary social relationships. A person can find himself expected to explain his position on an issue he never intended to discuss, and silence itself can become an invitation for somebody else to assign him one.

This is where a free society begins to run into trouble.

“Silence is complicity” is a powerful moral accusation. But when it becomes a general rule, silence itself becomes evidence to interpret.

Your refusal to endorse something can be treated as opposition to it. Your refusal to condemn something can be treated as support for it. Saying that you don't know enough to have an opinion can be treated as an evasion.

The demand is no longer simply that you be free to speak. You are expected to make your allegiance visible.

In a truly free society, the ability to be silent must be protected.

That does not mean people should be prevented from speaking. It means something very different. It means the choice to speak, remain silent, change your mind, or simply say, “I don't know,” has to remain a legitimate choice.

Otherwise freedom of expression becomes strangely conditional. You are free to speak, provided you understand that silence may be interpreted as speech anyway.

Economist Timur Kuran has spent decades studying what he calls “preference falsification,” the process by which people publicly express views that differ from their private beliefs because the cost of honesty is too high.

His latest research with Fasih Zulfiqar takes that idea a step further. Their 2026 paper, From Performance to Habit: How Preference Falsification Becomes Self-Reinforcing, examines how repeated public performance can become habitual, creating a public persona that eventually constrains the person who created it.

Consider what that looks like in an ordinary room.

Several people have reservations about the prevailing opinion. Nobody wants to be the first person to say so. One person stays quiet. Another sees the silence and assumes agreement. A third joins the apparent consensus because being the odd person out suddenly seems uncomfortable.

The room now looks unanimous.

It isn't.

That distinction matters.

A society can become more extreme in public without everyone in it becoming more extreme in private. People learn what can safely be said. They learn what should probably be left alone. They watch what happens to people who step outside the accepted line.

Eventually, some stop speaking altogether.

The moderate may not disappear. He may simply become invisible.

And invisibility creates its own feedback loop.

Activists can look at public declarations and see expanding support. Moderates can look at the same declarations and conclude that their own position is becoming marginal. Someone who is genuinely undecided may decide that keeping his mouth shut is easier than explaining himself.

Nobody has to order the silence.

The social environment does the work.

That is why the Steinberg comment is more interesting than whether she was right or wrong about Gaza. “All art is political” is not merely a statement about art. It is a statement about expectation.

If art is political by definition, then an artist who tries to keep politics outside the concert is not really neutral. He is simply making a political choice by refusing to participate.

And if that logic is extended far enough, neutrality itself becomes impossible.

This is why I am less interested in whether Ed Sheeran was right or wrong about any particular political question than I am in the pressure surrounding an entertainer who had tried to preserve a particular kind of public space. Whatever one thinks of his handling of the controversy, the reaction demonstrated how difficult that space has become to defend.

Political questions have always become morally charged. There have always been moments when neutrality looked cowardly to one group and principled to another.

That isn't new.

What matters is when the expectation of alignment becomes pervasive enough that people begin policing one another's silence.

A concert becomes a stage for political identity. A workplace becomes another. A university classroom becomes another. A corporation issues a statement. A professional organization takes a position. Friends ask where you stand.

Eventually people begin managing their public identities before anyone even asks.

That is how neutrality dies.

It does not require a law.

It does not require censorship.

It does not even require an organized campaign.

It can happen through reputation, professional pressure, social exclusion, fear of being misunderstood and the very ordinary human desire to avoid being disliked.

And there is a peculiar consequence.

The country can begin to look more divided and more ideologically uniform at the same time.

The loudest voices become more visible. The people who disagree become more cautious. The people who are undecided say less. Those who simply don't want to participate in every political argument disappear from the public picture.

What remains looks like consensus.

It may not be.

A healthy political culture needs people who argue. It also needs people who are undecided, people who change their minds, people who refuse political labels and people who simply don't want to participate in every argument placed in front of them.

Those people are not defects in the system.

They are part of the freedom the system is supposed to protect.

The question isn't whether Americans should speak. Of course they should.

The question is whether they remain free to decide when.

If every silence becomes suspicious, every reservation becomes a confession and every refusal to participate becomes a political statement, we will eventually fill the country with people performing convictions for one another.

It will look like agreement.

It may even feel like consensus.

But beneath the performance there may still be millions of people who simply wanted the freedom to think for themselves before somebody demanded that they choose a side.

Luis Gonzalez is owner/publisher of The Last Wire, an independent blog covering news, politics, opinion, and rabbit holes beneath the headlines. He has appeared in American Thinker. Writing online since 2000, he is the founder of Boiling Frogs, a personal blog launched in 2008. A retired foodservice professional with more than 40 years on both the operator and supply sides of the industry, he hangs his hat at The Briefing Room, resident curmudgeon.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/the-death-of-neutrality-when-a-free-society-demands-that-everyone-take-a-side/