I want to address this accusation. Rand openly acknowledged her position, and there's no hypocrisy in it.
First, the "fake name" is a myth. She used Ann O'Connor, a version of her real married name. Her husband was Frank O'Connor. There was no alias and nothing hidden. The records were public, recovered through a routine FOIA request.
Now the principle, which she stated plainly. A man forced to pay into a system has every right to reclaim what was taken from him. In fact, only the opponent of the welfare state has a clean moral right to it, because he never sanctioned the theft, while its supporters endorse the very crime.
It is not contradictory to oppose a system and still take back your own money. I oppose Social Security. I will still cash the check, because it is my money, seized from me by force, and I will never recover what I paid in.
Refusing it frees no one. It only lets the looters keep what they stole. Reclaiming what is yours is not accepting the system. It is refusing to be its victim twice.
@EchoesofWarYT Great post! He was a staunch socialist who viewed the Constitution as "an obstacle to progress" (his words). He ranks as the worst POTUS on my list (above Wilson, Obama, and Biden) because his Presidency fundamentally changed the US into the welfare state we have to this day.
Europeans stepping foot in America and realizing what real freedom, abundance, and greatness looks like 🇺🇸✨ From Buc-ee’s adventures to everything in between—this is the content we live for! Who else loves watching people discover why America is truly the land of dreams?
God bless this great country! 🙏❤️
LISTEN: Jacob Rockwell was fined for running a red light in Pensacola, Florida.
Only thing is Jacob wasn’t in Florida, he was in Alabama.
He sounded off at a local city meeting recently and his concerns go beyond just one citation.
John Lennon wrote a beautiful song about socialism.
“Imagine no possessions” he told us.
He also:
– helped write his band’s anti-tax anthem, Taxman
– incorporated his IP holdings
– moved to a lower-tax country
– fiercely protected his royalties
- drove two Rolls Royce’s and had multiple luxury homes.
– made sure even the royalty cheques for Imagine were kept safe for his estate so his family would remain wealthy in perpetuity.
If he believed it, he’d have lived it. The trouble with socialism is that even the people who love the idea won’t run the experiment on themselves.
John Lennon writing Imagine while owning two Rolls Royce Phantoms and later having a law suit to protect his royalties tells you all you need to know about socialism in practice.
It doesn’t work outside of the imagination.
PAYOFF: In 1979, Jimmy Carter created the Cabinet-level Department of Education as the price of the National Education Association’s first presidential endorsement. It was not an emergency reform. It was a political payoff. Forty-six years and trillions of dollars later, the results are clear: the teachers unions and federal bureaucracy gained power, while American students gained almost nothing. The US now spends more per child than nearly any country and more in total than any country, yet 17-year-olds perform no better than students did before the Department existed. That is the strongest indictment of all: five decades of massive federal spending produced no measurable academic gain. The experiment failed. Reagan saw it in 1983. Trump should finish the job and abolish the Department of Education.
Today, on my final day as Director of National Intelligence, I’m releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Dr. Fauci provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, worked with politicized elements within the Intelligence Community to suppress the truth about his actions and hide the virus’ lab-leak origins, and lied to Congress while under oath in 2024. It’s time you know the truth.
https://t.co/3YJSstB7d4
Let me break it down in a simple way that I’ve been reporting from the beginning.
To invent a vaccine for a disease that didn’t exist, our scientific Einsteins used taxpayer money to partner with communist China to create the dangerous virus in a lab—So that they could create a vaccine for it.
Covid was a result of primarily US funded vaccine research, and that’s the thing they could not let you know.
They stopped at nothing to obfuscate, misdirect, cover their tracks, protect themselves, and controversialize anyone telling the truth.
The scientific establishment and media aided and abetted.
I can think of no more impactful, crimes and violations that have occurred in our lifetime.
I appreciate the direct response, Congressman @RoKhanna. You've raised a real question, so let me answer it seriously.
You're partly right, and I'll grant it fully: the Founders who established a government to protect individual rights performed an achievement no inventor can match, because they built the precondition for every other achievement. Jefferson and the framers created the framework of liberty. Lincoln preserved it and extended its promise to those wrongly denied it. On that we agree. The statesman who secures freedom is a hero of the highest order.
But notice the distinction that matters. Those men are great precisely to the degree they protected liberty, not to the degree they exercised power. The Founders' greatness was in handing power back. Lincoln's was in ending a violation of rights, slavery, the gravest in our history.
That is why FDR doesn't belong with them. He did the opposite. He expanded the state at the expense of the freedom the Founders secured: seizing gold under threat of prison, attempting to pack the Court, building the apparatus that treats your earnings as the government's to allocate. He used power; he didn't restrain it.
And here is the deeper point. You frame it as Rockefeller and Musk versus the statesmen, as if they compete. They don't. The statesman's whole purpose is to protect the conditions, namely individual rights, in which the producer can create.
The Founders, along with Locke and Aristotle, built the house. Musk, Rockefeller, Bezos, and Vanderbilt are examples of what free men do inside it.
If you fully understood the principle of individual rights, you would be fighting against men and women like Warren, AOC, Sanders, and the rest of these collectivist statists in both parties, instead of advocating ideas that deprive individuals of the very rights you claim to honor.
Muslims have destroyed thousands of churches throughout the Middle East and forced 2 million indigenous Christians to flee their homes.
They consider Christians infidels who must convert, pay jizya, or be killed.
Zero outrage by leftists or Muslims!
A 24-year-old Polish tennis player arrived in Paris last week ranked 114th in the world, with no sponsors, no guaranteed income, and no certainty she could even pay for her hotel room.
She had to win three qualifying matches just to enter the French Open main draw. Prize money is only paid at the end of the tournament, so a Polish sports drink brand quietly stepped in and covered her hotel bill.
Her name is Maja Chwalinska. And today, she plays in the French Open final.
Before this tournament, she had won exactly one Grand Slam main draw match in her entire career. She had battled depression so severe that in 2021 she couldn't get out of bed. She underwent knee surgery in 2022. She spent years grinding through small tournaments across Europe just to stay afloat.
Then she arrived in Paris, won three qualifiers, and kept winning. Zheng Qinwen. Elise Mertens. Maria Sakkari. Diana Shnaider. Nine straight matches. One set dropped.
She is now the first qualifier in French Open history to reach the final. The last time a qualifier reached a Grand Slam final, it was Emma Raducanu at the 2021 US Open. Raducanu won.
By simply making the final, Chwalinska has earned more prize money than her entire career combined. The runner-up cheque alone is $1.6 million. If she wins today, she takes home $3.25 million.
One week ago she couldn't pay for her hotel room.
@LanceMcAlister@LouisvilleBats I agree with everything but playing Marte in CF when we guys that are much better at CF than him. Pencil him in RF. Steer should stay at 1B, Stewart should be at 4B with Geno getting the odd start. Hayes should not see anymore time. Bleday, Dunn, Myers play the other 2 OF spots.
@JesseRogersESPN Salary caps create parity across the sport which energizes and greatly expands fan bases. That leads to exploding revenue that then enables higher caps so most players ultimately make more. In the NFL virtually every fan base believes they have a chance. Baseball is the opposite.
@DividendBreeder Nice strawman. As if there is no way to pay for those things without taxing property that was purchased with money that was already taxed.