Editor’s note: Beginning next week, Porter will deliver the Daily Journal every day that markets are open – that is, every weekday, Monday to Friday. And, now, the Saturday Stock Screen has become the Sunday Screener – same great analytical insights, just one day later, arriving Sunday at 10 AM ET going forward.

Inside today’s Daily Journal…

Today’s Journal will cost me between 500 and 1,000 subscribers. Maybe more… Maybe all of you.

I’m taking on the two most dangerous false beliefs that drive political fanatics in our society today. I’ll explain why I decided to write these Journals – and especially this one below.

Let’s start here. These facts are all obvious. While verifiable by scientific inquiry, they are all also readily apparent to any reasonably intelligent adult.

Fact #1. When you look at the sky, what do you see? The sun. The sun provides 99.98% of the total energy that drives Earth’s climate. Every wind pattern, ocean current, and biological cycle is a secondary or tertiary effect of solar radiation. A variation of just 0.1% to 0.5% in solar output can equal or exceed the theoretical “radiative forcing” of all human-produced greenhouse gases combined.

Fact #2. Earth’s orbit isn’t a perfect circle. This is well-proven and widely known. The orbit wobbles and stretches over thousands of years, changes known to science as eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession. These known cycles change Earth’s distance from the sun and thus alter how much solar energy is received. These cycles are the proven drivers of every Ice Age and interglacial period in Earth’s history.

Fact #3. The cost of a total global transition to net-zero carbon emissions is estimated by consulting firm McKinsey & Company to be hundreds of trillions of dollars through 2050. These amounts exceed total current global GDP over that timeline. Any sustained attempt to enforce net-zero protocols globally would cause a worldwide economic collapse and lead to billions of deaths.

Fact #4. There is no global sovereign power capable of enforcing compliance with a net-zero protocol. Thus, despite decades of international agreements (the Kyoto Protocol, Paris Accords, etc.), global CO₂ emissions have continued to rise.

I could go on.

There are many other obvious falsehoods in the climate catastrophe narrative. In short, the science doesn’t tell us anything like what Al Gore says it does.

In fact, even today, climate researchers are not certain whether or not clouds (you’ve seen those, haven’t you?) contribute to global warming or lead to cooler temperatures. And, perhaps most damning, ice cores prove conclusively that during other warming periods, temperatures rose before increases to CO₂ in the atmosphere. In other words, in the real world, it’s temperature that drives CO₂ levels, not the other way around.

But my point isn’t to win the scientific argument. There’s no winning any argument with a “true believer.” My point is this: the climate-emergency narrative is utterly absurd on its face. You can see the sun. You can do basic math, and you know that fossil fuels are the bedrock of the modern world. And you know, no matter what Al Gore says about coal, the Chinese don’t give a fuck.

So even if you believe that something that’s only 0.04% of the atmosphere is going to lead to a climate catastrophe, you’d have to be completely delusional to believe this is a problem that we can solve. And if there isn’t a viable solution, then there’s no problem.

Climate hysteria isn’t scientific. It isn’t logical. It’s a new religion that is attracting hundreds of millions of “true believers.”

Telling them they’re wrong won’t help. It’s the extent of the lie that drives their belief. And that lie – that carbon, the element of life, is going to kill us all – is one of the biggest lies that’s ever been told.

Now, most of my subscribers are probably nodding their heads and thinking about their purple-haired stepdaughter who is a climate nut.

But hang on…

The climate Nazis aren’t the most dangerous true believers in America.

Here are a few more obvious facts…

Fact #1. Since 1950, we’ve spent almost $15 trillion building nuclear warheads. We’ve built 77,000 nuclear warheads, each with an average destructive capacity of 13x the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945. Using even 100 of these warheads would poison the entire atmosphere and kill billions of people, including millions of Americans. There is zero credible military rationale for the size of this arsenal. And you’ll never guess what happens when you build so many doomsday machines: You lose some of them. The U.S. military admits to losing six warheads. If they admit to losing six of them, the real total must be considerably higher.

Fact #2. The U.S. defense budget (approximately $900 billion) is larger than that of the next nine countries combined, including China, Russia, India, and the UK. In fact, the U.S. spends more on R&D than most developed nations spend on their entire militaries.

Fact #3. We have 11 super carrier groups, and each one holds an air force larger than 70% of all of the other air forces in the world. No other nation has a single super carrier. We have 220 Global Master aircraft – no other nation has more than 10.

Fact #4. We have 18 Ohio Class nuclear submarines, which are virtually undetectable and can be positioned almost anywhere, at any time. Because these machines are nuclear powered, they only need to be refueled every 42 years. They carry 20 Trident missiles, which have intercontinental range and carry multiple warheads. If all of these boats launched their full complement of nuclear weapons, they could launch 1,100 warheads – enough to destroy every major city in the world several times over… and poison the entire globe.

I got a lot of replies to Wednesday’s Journal, when I gave what I thought was a fairly obvious and cogent explanation of how tariffs are merely taxes and will not help our economy. The dumbest replies weren’t from the people who argued that tariffs are necessary to ensure “fairness” in trade. Yes, those replies don’t make any sense. Europe has a 20% VAT (value-added) tax. Do you think we should add this tax too? To make it “fair.”

No, the replies that scared me the most were from people who insisted that the U.S. requires large tariffs across the entire economy to ensure that the military will be ready to defend America.

Here’s the last fact.

Fact #5. There are more than 500 million legally owned and registered firearms in America. For a foreign power to occupy the United States and subjugate us would require at least 40 million troops. There’s no occupying force in the world that large, not even if you combined every army in the world.

Anyone who thinks the military is protecting us is a “true believer.”

The only logical explanation for the outrageous size of our defense spending and our enormous collection of doomsday weapons is to protect the military from us, not the other way around. The only nation on Earth that could threaten the U.S. military is the American people. That’s the only explanation for the arsenal they’ve built.

All of the wars and everything else they do is merely theater. In my entire life there hasn’t been a single viable threat to our sovereignty. But how many wars have we fought – and how many of them were authorized by Congress? None.

Why?

The truth is right in front of you. It’s blindingly obvious. There is no moral or practical military application for a thermonuclear weapon. And yet we built 77,000 of them at a cost of $15 trillion.

None of these facts will matter. I’ll receive hundreds of emails arguing that it was these weapons that saved us from the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nevermind that the Soviets didn’t have a single military platform that could have reliably delivered such a weapon to the U.S. until the 1970s. The Soviets were never a credible threat to the sovereignty of the United States and they still aren’t today. Communists can’t build rockets or bombs any better than they build cars. Their nuclear submarines leak so much radiation that tracking them is easy and their crews all die of radiation.

But, again, none of this matters to true believers. There is no level of military spending that will ever make them feel safe.

Most of my subscribers can easily see the climate hoax for what it is because those aren’t your people, that isn’t your “tribe.” Those are the freaks with purple hair.

But the lie you believe in – that the military serves the people – is even more dangerous. And the people who believe that lie are far more powerful and far more effective than the purple-hair crowd.

Think about it objectively: Who has killed more Americans over the last 50 years? Was it America’s foreign enemies, or was it our leaders sending troops into harm’s way for absolutely nothing?

So… why did I write these Journals?

As a publisher I have massive incentives to further false beliefs. Doing so would attract a larger and more fervent subscriber base: We’re in the lie together.

Plus, writing these essays will definitely cost me a lot of revenue, renewals, and Partnership members. It will cause unlimited future problems, too. It won’t be long before a mainstream media journalist picks up this story and writes that Porter Stansberry hates America, hates Trump, and wants the planet to burn.

So why do it?

What I know from observing my fellow humans is that they will believe anything. In my subscriber file we have some of the wealthiest, best-educated, and most sophisticated people in the world… and most of them sincerely believe that tariffs are good for the U.S. economy and that foreigners will pay for them! Even more of them believe the U.S. military needs more resources (!) to safeguard the country!

And some of them can’t even see the sun.

Most of the time “true believers” and the falsehoods they fervently identify with don’t make much of a difference. Most people are too busy with their families, their careers, and enjoying their lives to pay much attention. The fanatics are merely entertaining.

The trouble starts when people become desperate. That’s when the nature of their false beliefs change. And that’s when, suddenly, millions of people begin to adopt the same false beliefs.

Eric Hoffer’s core insight in his book The True Believer was that these aren’t people looking for a better life, but people with failed lives who are desperate to get rid of an unsatisfactory self. What transforms this into rage? When people lose confidence in their own ability to navigate life, they develop a profound hatred for the present.

A desperate person who hates their own life is more than willing to sacrifice it for a “holy cause.” They don’t want freedom. They want anonymity within a mass movement that promises to replace their individual misery with a glorious collective identity. They no longer see themselves as a “failed baker” or a “defeated soldier,” but as a “soldier in the Thousand-Year Reich” or a “vanguard of the proletariat.” They aren’t a failed man – they’re a transwoman who is part of a new civil rights movement.

Hoffer argued the most dangerous stage of a “true believer” occurs when their personal sense of failure intersects with a catastrophic national or economic crisis. When a person feels their own life is irredeemable, they stop wanting to improve their own circumstances and start wanting to be rid of themselves by becoming part of a larger, “holy cause.”

This happened most obviously in Germany after its defeat in WWI. The resulting hyperinflation left millions of otherwise well-educated and successful people completely bankrupt with no path to security or success.

And that’s happening right now in America.

As I warned about 15 years ago in my documentary, The End Of America, as the U.S. government spirals into bankruptcy, the resulting economic chaos will lead to a complete breakdown of social norms.

I predicted we’d see soaring rates of desperation-linked anti-social, self-destructive behavior, like addiction, gambling, prostitution, and all kinds of sexual deviancy.

Today, for the first time in my life, millions of people have begun to blame our troubles on Jews – the traditional scapegoat for a failing state.

But what comes next will be far, far worse.

The U.S. government isn’t on the path to failure. It’s there. There is absolutely no way, with $40 trillion in outstanding debt and a $2 trillion annual deficit (income taxes raise $2.5 trillion a year) that the government can survive even a mild recession. Any decrease in revenue would trigger a massive run on the dollar. (That’s what the tariffs are really all about: a government on the verge of collapse.)

When that economic downturn comes, inflation will soar – to Argentina-like levels. And millions of Americans will be completely wiped out.

Your Social Security check won’t buy a loaf of bread.

When that happens everything that you think you know about this country will change.

The government will do whatever it takes to remain solvent and in power – like printing unbelievable sums of money and forcing you to hold it.

What you’re not prepared for is the extent of the violence that will emerge as this happens. Hundreds of millions of otherwise normal, law-abiding Americans will suddenly become “true believers.” And what they will believe is that your property belongs to them.

Get ready. It’s coming.

Tell me what you think of today’s Daily Journal: [email protected]

Good investing,

Porter Stansberry
Stevenson, Maryland

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1. Celsius secures 20% of the energy-drink market. Energy-drink maker Celsius (CELH) reported blowout Q4 results yesterday, with sales increasing 117% to $722 million. The company now holds 20% U.S. market share – behind only Monster Beverage (MNST) and Red Bull – and contributed to 33% of the total category growth in 2025. Shares have gained 17% year to date, and we see more market-beating returns ahead.

2. OpenAI raises $110 billion while CoreWeave plunges 19%. This morning, AI developer OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history – $110 billion at a $730 billion valuation, with $50 billion coming from Amazon (AMZN), $30 billion from Nvidia (NVDA), and $30 billion from Japanese investment holding company SoftBank. Just hours earlier, CoreWeave (CRWV) – the GPU cloud provider that actually runs AI workloads for OpenAI and others – reported weaker-than-expected Q4 earnings that sent shares down 19%. CoreWeave revenue grew a better-than-expected 110% year-over-year to $1.6 billion. However, the company still lost $452 million in the quarter, as 25% of sales went to servicing its massive $30 billion in debt. The money pouring into AI is real… but so are the ballooning costs of building it.

3. Anthropic refuses the Pentagon. Yesterday, Dario Amodei, the co-founder and CEO of AI-platform developer Anthropic, said that the company would not accept a U.S. Defense Department contract that would allow removing safeguards from Anthropic’s large language model platform Claude – such as with mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. Amodei cited that those applications are incompatible with Anthropic’s democratic values. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman voiced similar concerns.

Shares of leading gold royalty streamer Franco-Nevada (FNV) are up 156% since our recommendation in May 2023 – and shares are up 139% after having been part of Best Buys for much of 2024.

On Wednesday, we asked Daily Journal readers where they believed the S&P 500 would be at the end of 2026… It seems that half (49%) of survey takers are bullish. They see the S&P 500 “10% or more higher than it is today,” while 28% see it “10% or more lower,” and 23% think it will be about where it is today, just under 7,000.

Stan D. writes:

Porter Comment: Kurt – I’m doing my best to educate folks. I’ve had the luxury of thinking about these ideas, researching these topics, and writing and reading about them for almost 40 years. For me, this is all obvious. For many others, they simply don’t understand even the basics of economics.

You wrote: “Moving jobs that the middle class used to have out of the U.S. is more efficient and leads to great trade deals. Great for us. Not so great for many who do not take the time and effort to work, save, and do financial investments.”

Respectfully, this is another sophism. What matters to us all is the overall productivity of our economy.

Business owners making hard decisions (with real facts) about where their capital will be treated best is what’s best for all of us. How could it be otherwise?

Let me give you a concrete example.

In 1962, Warren Buffett – using both his and his partners’ capital – started buying stock in Berkshire Hathaway. This was a major U.S. business and huge employer in New England, which, for decades, was the textile capital of the world. Over time, for a variety of reasons, most of the investments in new textile factories were made in the American South. Later, these investments would move overseas – like Nike’s factories in Vietnam.

So, do the thought experiment with me.

What if, using your theory of the economy, Buffett hadn’t done what was best for the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway? What if, as you suggest he ought to have done, he only reinvested more capital into Berkshire’s New England textile mills? And to make sure that employment there grew, he invested billions and billions into those mills. And so he never bought See’s Candies. He never bought The Washington Post. He never invested in property and casualty insurance. He never bought shares of Coke (KO). Or Apple (AAPL). Or American Express (AXP). He never bought BNSF. Or NetJets.

And instead of producing around $1 trillion in profits for Americans (including pension funds, insurance companies, and millions of retirement accounts) and paying about as much in taxes over the years, he earned paltry returns in textiles. Barely enough to keep up with inflation.

Some people in Bedford, Massachusetts, would have benefited. But at what cost?

That’s why – at every point in history, in every country – economies that are driven by owners making free choices about their capital vastly perform all planned economies.

It’s easy for you to point to the losers in our current economy. And, yes, there will always be losers. But it’s far better for there to be winners and losers in a pie that constantly grows than for us to all equally share a pie that disappears.

Best,

Porter

Tom B. writes:

Grant M. writes:

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