Trump Says Strait of Hormuz is Open With No Tolls After Iran Claims Closure

Trump Says Strait of Hormuz is Open With No Tolls After Iran Claims Closure, Suggests US Will Charge Tolls “For Services Rendered as the Guardian Angel to the Middle East”

Jordan Conradson

US officials, including President Trump, are denying Iran’s claim that the Strait of Hormuz will be closed after accusing the US and Israel of violating the memorandum of understanding. 

“There will be NO TOLLS in the Hormuz Strait for 60 days during the Cease Fire Period, and there will be NO TOLLS after the 60 day period has expired,” Trump said in a statement on Saturday afternoon.

As the Gateway Pundit reported earlier, Iran claimed it was closing the Strait again after continued fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon on Friday and Saturday. Iran says Israel’s refusal to withdraw troops from Lebanon violates the memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran.

However, US Central Command said in a statment this morning that “Commercial ship traffic in the Strait of Hormuz increased June 20 as U.S. forces continued operating in the general area to support freedom of navigation.” The statement continued, “Safe passage through the international waterway remained intact today as 55 merchant ships transited, moving large amounts of cargo and more than 17 million barrels of oil to global markets.”

Vice President JD Vance also responded on Saturday morning. In an update on the talks with Iran, Vance said, "We got 16 million barrels out of the Strait of Hormuz in the last 24 hours. That is basically to where it was before the war even started, and so that suggests that the straits really are open."

"We're not seeing any evidence that the Iranians are still closing down the Strait of Hormuz," he added.

CENTCOM spokesperson Capt. Tim Hawkins also said in a statement, "Iran does not control the Strait of Hormuz. Traffic continues to flow, and U.S. forces are monitoring the situation to ensure this remains the case."

Trump, who is currently on a rare visit to Camp David, declared that the Strait is open and that no tolls will be charged for shipping. He further suggested that the only tolls that will ever be charged in the Strait will be American tolls, "should the deal not be completed, for services rendered as the Guardian Angel to the countries of the Middle East for purposes of both past, present, and future reimbursement of costs."

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Reports: US VP Vance flying to Switzerland today ahead of Iran talks; Witkoff, Kushner, Qatari PM already there

Reports: US VP Vance flying to Switzerland today ahead of Iran talks; Witkoff, Kushner, Qatari PM already there

TOI STAFF and AGENCIES

US Vice President JD Vance is expected to fly to Switzerland later Saturday to participate in tomorrow’s negotiations with Iran at the Burgenstock alpine resort, Axios reports.

US President Donald Trump’s special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have already arrived at the resort, according to reporter Barak Ravid, as have top officials from mediating countries, including Qatar’s prime minister.

Iranian state media reports that Tehran’s negotiating team includes parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and central bank and oil officials, among others, some of whom have also already arrived at the resort ahead of the talks, which mediator Pakistan described as “technical.”

AI-Powered Cameras Are Destroying Our Privacy

AI-Powered Cameras that are Destroying Our Privacy

Matt Agorist

As corporate profiteers rake in billions under the guise of public safety, their vast network of automated license plate readers is quietly transforming the basic right to peaceful travel into an inescapable, taxpayer-funded surveillance dragnet.

Every time you pull out of your driveway, you probably still harbor the illusion that you are a free individual going about your business. The reality is far more grim: your vehicle is bleeding data into a massive, unregulated dragnet the moment you pass the neighborhood entrance. Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) and Flock cameras have infested our communities, quietly transforming the American landscape into an open-air panopticon.

You are no longer just a traveler; you are a heavily tracked data point in a system designed to treat every peaceful citizen as a suspect. The apologists for the police state are always quick to play the devil’s advocate when these surveillance grids face public scrutiny. They will breathlessly point out that ALPRs do sometimes help law enforcement track the plates of a stolen car or a violent suspect.

Police departments and the corporate salesmen hawking this gear parade these isolated victories in front of gullible city councils to justify millions in taxpayer funding. We are constantly told that solving a fraction of property crimes requires us to surrender our basic human dignity and privacy. But this statist narrative entirely ignores the tyrannical caveat that makes the whole operation illegitimate.

For every single actual criminal apprehended, the daily movements of tens of thousands of peaceful, innocent individuals are meticulously logged, tracked, and stored in massive databases. You have committed no crime, yet the State knows exactly when you dropped your kids off at school, which doctor you visited, and what political rally you attended. It is a preemptive strike by a paranoid ruling class against the very people they claim to serve.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, these automated systems do much more than just read numbers on a bumper. They capture the time, date, and precise coordinates of every passing vehicle, storing this highly sensitive location data for months or even years. This allows law enforcement to retroactively hit “rewind” on anyone’s life without ever setting foot inside a courtroom to obtain a warrant.

The ACLU has thoroughly documented how this dragnet operates, revealing that the overwhelming majority of people swept up in these databases are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. Despite this glaring fact, the data is pooled and shared across thousands of jurisdictions, essentially creating a national tracking system operated by private entities

Taxpayers are literally being extorted to fund the infrastructure of their own surveillance. Nefarious corporate groups like Flock Safety are getting extraordinarily wealthy off this unconstitutional model. They sell fear to local politicians and walk away with lucrative contracts, deepening their network of unlawful data collection as we have consistently covered here at The Free Thought Project. The public is forced at gunpoint to foot the bill for a corporate-state partnership that actively violates their inherent rights.

This panopticon is being built piecemeal through thousands of localized contracts quietly approved by city councils, police departments, and even private homeowner associations. Flock Safety alone has embedded itself in over 6,000 municipalities, operating a staggering network of more than 80,000 cameras nationwide to indiscriminately log the movements of peaceful individuals.

The financial windfall generated by this unconstitutional dragnet is nothing short of extortionary. Weaponizing the public’s fear of crime, Flock Safety has ballooned into an $8.4 billion empire, siphoning massive amounts of wealth directly from the taxpayers they are constantly monitoring. With local governments shelling out up to $3,500 per camera annually, this corporate-state partnership raked in over $300 million in recurring revenue by early 2025. The public is literally being forced under the threat of state violence to finance their own digital incarceration, enriching corporate entities while fundamental rights are casually discarded.

To grasp the true, dystopian scale of this operation, consider that these private systems are performing over 20 billion scans of vehicles across the country every single month. 

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New World Order Takeover Blurring the Boundaries

New World Order Takeover Blurring the Boundaries

Paul A. Phillips

Not so long ago, to coincide with a presentation, Pope Leo XIV published a declaration, his first encyclical, consisting of some 42,000 plus words “Magnifica Humanatas.” 

What made this presentation unique was the fact that it’s the first in papal history dedicated to AI (Artificial intelligence).

In this declaration, in front of leading religious figures and Christopher Olah, representing left-wing biased OpenAI researchers, Anthropic, Pope Leo XIV addresses serious issues/concerns: 

“The fight against new forms of slavery is a decisive test for the ethical discernment of AI and digital transformation.”

He went on to say that: “If technology promises emancipation, yet produces new forms of global subordination, it stands in contradiction to the fundamental principle of human dignity…”

For more on this, have a look at the Vatican’s website on “Safeguarding the human person in the time of human intelligence.” 

In other words, like Pope Leo XIV, many of us are gravely concerned that governments have not put in enough regulation, allowing profit-driven private corporations unchecked advances in AI 

Consequences include: Ongoing threats to many humans losing their jobs to AI takeover, fake AI-generated content, online cyber-attacks, indiscriminate warfare…  

As with other controlling agendas for their New World Order (NWO) advancement, the global cult use the tactic of blurring the boundaries. 

They have deliberately distorted, blurred the boundaries between that which separates AI from human: 

Blurring the boundaries that separate inhumanity from the humanity, robot from human, fake from real representations, AI from human intelligence as humans are being dumbed-down, freedom from enslavement…

There are other ways whereby the global cult agenda uses the tactic of blurring the boundaries for advancing their NWO takeover: 

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The AI Cold War: How the U.S.-China Race Could Impact Energy, Water, and Consumers

How the U.S.-China Race Could Impact Energy, Water, and Consumers

Fernando sanchez

As the United States and China deepen their competition for global leadership in artificial intelligence, a less visible battle is beginning to raise concerns among regulators, state governments, and local communities: the enormous energy and environmental costs required to power the data centers that support the next generation of AI systems.

The recent decision by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), backed by Energy Secretary Chris Wright and the administration of President Donald Trump, seeks to accelerate the connection of large data centers to the national power grid. The objective is clear: to prevent the United States from losing ground to China in what has become known as the “Artificial Intelligence Cold War.”

Behind this technological race are giants such as OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Oracle, and xAI, companies that require ever-increasing amounts of electricity to train and operate increasingly sophisticated AI models. According to estimates from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), data centers already consume approximately 5 percent of all electricity generated in the United States, and that demand could triple by 2035.

However, the nation’s energy infrastructure is not expanding at the same pace. Industry experts warn that the electrical grid faces significant limitations in absorbing the thousands of additional megawatts required by the AI industry. In states such as Virginia, home to the world’s largest concentration of data centers, these facilities already account for more than a quarter of total statewide electricity demand.

FERC Chair Laura Swett has acknowledged concerns about the impact these new connections could have on consumers’ electricity bills. Although the commission has ruled that data center operators must bear the costs of the infrastructure upgrades required for their grid connections, questions remain about who will ultimately pay for the additional investments needed to strengthen transmission networks, build new power lines, and develop power generation facilities capable of meeting such demand.

Major U.S. utilities and grid operators, including PJM Interconnection, Dominion Energy, Duke Energy, Southern Company, and other regional providers, are facing growing pressure to ensure adequate electricity supplies without passing excessive costs on to households and businesses.

Yet the challenge extends beyond energy alone. Data centers also require massive cooling systems to prevent servers from overheating. These facilities consume millions of gallons of water each year, particularly in regions where evaporative cooling technologies are used. Environmental organizations warn that the large-scale expansion of these complexes could place additional strain on aquifers and water reserves, especially in areas already experiencing recurring drought conditions.

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