Only two members of the House Armed Services Committee moved to strip section 224 from the NDAA, those honorable members were:
🇺🇸 Ro Khanna (D-CA)
🇺🇸 Sara Jacobs (D-CA)
Every other member of the House Armed Services Committee is a sell out and a traitor to this nation. Those members are listed here:
• Mike Rogers (R-AL)
• Joe Wilson (R-SC)
• Michael R. Turner (R-OH)
• Robert J. Wittman (R-VA)
• Austin Scott (R-GA)
• Sam Graves (R-MO)
• Elise Stefanik (R-NY)
• Scott DesJarlais (R-TN)
• Trent Kelly (R-MS)
• Don Bacon (R-NE)
• Jack Bergman (R-MI)
• Ronny Jackson (R-TX)
• Pat Fallon (R-TX)
• Carlos A. Gimenez (R-FL)
• Nancy Mace (R-SC)
• Brad Finstad (R-MN)
• Morgan Luttrell (R-TX)
• Jennifer Kiggans (R-VA)
• James Moylan (R-GU)
• Cory Mills (R-FL)
• Rich McCormick (R-GA)
• Lance Gooden (R-TX)
• Clay Higgins (R-LA)
• Derrick Van Orden (R-WI)
• John McGuire (R-VA)
• Pat Harrigan (R-NC)
• Mark Messmer (R-IN)
• Derek Schmidt (R-KS)
• Jeff Crank (R-CO)
• Abraham Hamadeh (R-AZ)
• Adam Smith (D-WA)
• Joe Courtney (D-CT)
• John Garamendi (D-CA)
• Donald Norcross (D-NJ)
• Seth Moulton (D-MA)
• Salud Carbajal (D-CA)
• Bill Keating (D-MA)
• Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA)
• Jason Crow (D-CO)
• Jared Golden (D-ME)
• Marilyn Strickland (D-WA)
• Pat Ryan (D-NY)
• Gabe Vasquez (D-NM)
• Chris Deluzio (D-PA)
• Jill Tokuda (D-HI)
• Donald Davis (D-NC)
• Gil Cisneros (D-CA)
• Eric Sorensen (D-IL)
• Maggie Goodlander (D-NH)
• Sarah Elfreth (D-MD)
• George Whitesides (D-CA)
• Derek Tran (D-CA)
• Eugene Vindman (D-VA)
• Wesley Bell (D-MO)
• Herb Conaway (D-NJ)
Call your representatives in the House. Tell them to remove section 224 from the NDAA. 💥
HEADS UP! While attention focuses (understandably) on the House effort to legislate new US-Israel military relations via the FY27 NDAA, the Senate is quietly doing something similar via the FY27 Intell Authorization bill. Buckle up — it's a big deal. 🧵
1/
Imagine spending your whole life becoming an academic expert. Then a random guy online tells you that you are wrong about your own field. And he's right. But you can never admit that. Because it would mean admitting that your life was a lie. That is the dilemma of many academics.
@axifyclipping_ Shameful these girls are exploiting themselves in such a diabolical manner. What is the root cause of this? Is it just that they can be highly visible for clicks now instead of limited to be on a street corner?
Sharing again as many people have forgotten what they did/are still doing. Pls never leave your loved one without an advocate while hospitalized.
@protocolkills
So folks, I’m going to need some help finding the fraud valuations and intricacies of tds tech derangement syndrome. You know it’s there and it will be lethal. America First
@Thefactsdude The shift lead shoved her and she shoved back after shift leader yelled and aggressively entered personal space, now she is dead and another one will live with that forever. There is such a thing as elder abuse.
Imagine pounding an elder like that over a coffee. Shameful
@thecostakid These kids have no clue how to maturely connect in a healthy way, it’s all debasement, reprobate, immoral and disgusting behavior. All pursuing money at the expense of their hearts, minds, body and souls. So very sad and the beast machines reward.
🙏😵💫
I have been Director of Development and Major Gifts at the Obama Foundation for six years.
My CRM has 214 records classified as "Transformational" — meaning a cumulative giving capacity above $10 million. Forty-three of those records are institutions or individuals whose names appeared in the 2008 campaign's opposition research file under the heading "Wall Street Accountability Targets."
They are in our highest tier now. I don't see a contradiction. I see a conversion funnel.
I found this out by accident in 2021. A junior researcher was building donor profiles and cross-referenced our prospect list against the campaign archive. She showed me the overlap on a Tuesday afternoon — pulled it up on her second monitor, the opposition research file side by side with our Founding Visionaries list. Same names. Same institutions. Different columns. I told her the overlap was not relevant to our current work. I told her this calmly. She agreed. She was promoted in March. She now manages the Goldman relationship. She is excellent at it.
I want to describe how this works because it is beautiful in its architecture and I am proud of it and I believe other presidential foundations could learn from our model.
Our giving tiers are named after principles. "Founding Visionaries" is $25 million and above. "Architects of Progress" is $10 to $25 million. "Builders of Legacy" is $5 to $10 million. "Community Partners" is $1 to $5 million. Below $1 million we do not assign a name. Below $1 million we send a letter. The letter thanks them for "investing in the future of civic life." I wrote that language in 2019. I chose "investing" deliberately. It makes the donor feel their gift has a return. Which it does. Just not for them.
Actually, I should correct that. It does have a return for them. That is what I am here to describe.
Jamie offered to fund the reading room after the settlement. Not the DOJ settlement — his firm's settlement. The civil one. $13 billion. He wanted to do something positive for Chicago. I thought that was beautiful. His mother was a schoolteacher in Montclair, New Jersey, and the reading room will bear her name — "The Eleanor Dimon Reading Room" — and below her name, six thousand books about community organizing and social justice. The firm that paid $13 billion in mortgage fraud settlements is sponsoring a room that will teach children about justice. I arranged this. I am proud of this. The plaque will not mention the settlement. The plaque will say "A gift of the Dimon Family Foundation, in memory of a beloved educator."
Let me describe the cultivation events because they are where the real work happens.
In September 2024 we held a dinner at the Standard Club in Chicago. Forty-two attendees. Eighteen from financial services. Seven from technology. Four from health insurance. Three from telecommunications. Ten from the South Side — community organizers, principals, the alderman from the 20th ward. The ratio is by design. I designed it. The community members are not there to ask the financial services executives for anything. They are there to be proximate. To be visible. To be the reason the check clears.
I watch what happens at these dinners. A Goldman partner in a $4,000 sport coat shakes hands with the principal of Bouchet Elementary. They exchange pleasantries about the neighborhood. The Goldman partner's eyes get soft. He is not performing. That is what people don't understand. He is not performing. He genuinely feels, in that moment, that his $15 million gift is connected to this woman's school. He feels absolved. Not because he did something wrong — he would never frame it that way — but because proximity to the community makes the wealth feel earned again. Deserved again. Clean.
I call this "mission proximity." That is my term. I put it in our stewardship framework in 2022 and it has since been adopted by three other presidential foundations. I should trademark it. What it means is: we use the community's moral authority as a cleaning agent. But I would not say it that way in a meeting. I would say: "We create environments where donors can experience the impact of their generosity firsthand."
Goldman Sachs is an Architect of Progress. Their giving was structured across two entities — the foundation and the partnership fund — to allow both institutional recognition and individual credit for five named partners. When I met with their head of philanthropy in January 2020, she said their interest in the Center was "deeply personal." I asked what she meant. She said the 2008 crisis was "a formative period" for the firm and that President Obama's leadership during that time "gave them the stability to rebuild."
I want to pause on that sentence. She meant TARP. She meant zero prosecutions of senior executives. She meant that Eric Holder's Justice Department settled every single case with a fine — no admission of guilt, no individual charges, no perp walks, no prison, no disgorgement of bonuses. She meant that her partners kept their titles and their homes in Greenwich and their seats on the boards of museums. She meant that the man who campaigned on holding Wall Street accountable decided, through whatever calculus operates at that level, not to. She did not say any of this. She said "stability." And she was grateful. Genuinely grateful. With tears in her eyes.
I wrote it on a notecard. It is in their donor file. In my CRM the cultivation note reads: "Deep personal connection to OPC mission. References '08 as formative. Stability narrative — high emotional resonance. High likelihood of multi-year pledge. CULTIVATION APPROACH: mirror gratitude language. Do not reframe. Let donor own the narrative. Follow up May — fiscal year renewal. Connected to ACA negotiation (no public option). Wife on museum board — leverage for gala table."
I did not translate. I facilitated. The distance between those two things is where I live professionally.
Our health insurance donors are similarly motivated. UnitedHealth Group is a Builder of Legacy. Aetna gave through CVS Health's corporate philanthropy arm. Blue Cross Blue Shield Association gave through four regional entities to stay below the naming threshold — they preferred discretion. When I asked an executive at a Builders reception in 2023 what drew them to the Center, he said — and I wrote this down the moment I returned to my car — "The President understood that reform had to work within the market. He protected the structure that lets us serve our members."
By "reform" he meant the Affordable Care Act. By "within the market" he meant no public option. By "protected the structure" he meant that the insurance industry wrote the bill. By "serve our members" he meant that UnitedHealth Group's market capitalization went from $30 billion in 2009 to $560 billion today. He felt, genuinely and with warmth, that the President had been a partner. That governance had been a collaboration. That the Center was an appropriate place to express that partnership. He gave $8 million. The naming opportunity is a wellness pavilion. A wellness pavilion. Where South Side residents can access health screenings. Funded by the company that denied more claims than any other insurer in 2024.
I did not laugh. I never laugh. I wrote "partner" in my notebook. I circled it. I use that word in every subsequent meeting with him.
Last month I onboarded a new Architect of Progress. A telecommunications executive whose company's merger was approved in 2015 after the FCC reclassified broadband under Title II but declined to block the consolidation. He told me over dinner at RPM Seafood — he ordered the Dover sole, I remember this because I remember everything about my donors, it is my job to remember — that his company "believed in the President's vision for connectivity." His gift was $12 million. The naming opportunity is a digital media lab. South Side teenagers will learn to code there. It will have his company's logo above the door. The same company that spent $680 million lobbying against net neutrality after the President left office. The same company that throttled service to low-income neighborhoods in 2022. The teenagers will not know this. They will learn to code. They will be grateful. That is the product.
Here is what my CRM looks like. I will show you a sample record. I am not supposed to share this but I am proud of the system and I want you to understand the architecture.
DONOR: [REDACTED — Founding Visionary]
CUMULATIVE GIVING: $27.4M
ENTITY STRUCTURE: Family foundation + personal + corporate matching
CONNECTION HISTORY: 2007 bundler ($890K). 2012 Pioneer ($500K+). 2013 Ambassador to [REDACTED — NATO country]. Foundation engagement began 2018.
POLICY TOUCHPOINTS: ACA negotiation (represented insurance industry coalition). 2015 Trans-Pacific Partnership (board member, export council). 2016 clemency initiative (sat on advisory panel — unrelated to core business, but useful for "values alignment" narrative).
CULTIVATION NOTES: Prefers May cultivation — fiscal year renewal. Wife on museum board. Daughter at U of C — arrange campus tour of Center site. AVOID discussing TPP in current political environment. Frame all policy touchpoints as "legacy of bipartisan pragmatism."
NAMING: South Gallery — "The Art of Democracy" exhibition space.
STEWARDSHIP CADENCE: Quarterly touch. Annual dinner (Kalorama). Birthday card (Feb 14 — handwritten by Director).
I write the birthday cards by hand. I know their children's names. I know which wines they prefer at dinner. I know which policy outcomes made them wealthy and I know never to connect those two facts in their presence. That would be vulgar. The genius of this system is that nobody connects those facts. Not the donors. Not the community. Not the President. Not the schoolchildren. The facts exist in separate databases. My job is to keep them separate.
The architecture cost $850 million. The policies that funded it cost the American middle class considerably more. But the architecture is what you can photograph.
Let me tell you about the ribbon-cutting. It is in June. I have 214 Transformational donors confirmed. The President will speak. He will say something about the South Side. He will say something about ordinary citizens. He will say something about the fierce urgency of now. The people who paid for the building will sit in the first four rows. The people the building is for will sit behind them. Security will be arranged so that both groups enter through the same door — I insisted on this — because the optics of a separate donor entrance tested poorly in our focus groups. We did focus groups. We tested entrance choreography. We want everyone to feel equal in the space. Equal. In a building where your name is on the wall if you gave $10 million and you pass through anonymously if you gave nothing but your vote.
He won by running against them. They funded his monument. The monument celebrates his running against them. Nobody sees the circle. That is because the circle is the architecture.
The President will speak about hope. I have read early drafts. He references his 2004 convention speech. He references the South Side. He references "the audacity to believe that we can build something lasting." The "something lasting" is the building. The building was built with money from the people who were supposed to be held accountable. The building celebrates the failure to hold them accountable. The building calls that failure "hope." And now it is limestone and glass and it will stand for two hundred years and schoolchildren will walk through it and learn about "speaking truth to power" in a room sponsored by power and they will feel inspired.
I find this moving. I find it genuinely, physically moving. The circle is complete. The money came from harm. The money built a monument. The monument reframes the harm as governance. The governance becomes legacy. The legacy attracts more money. I am the custodian of this circle and I have never once broken it and I love my job.
I have one more thing to tell you. When we were choosing the name for the $25 million tier — "Founding Visionaries" — someone on the team suggested "Founding Donors." I rejected it. "Donors" implies charity. These people are not donating. They are purchasing. They are purchasing absolution and historical revision and the right to have their name on the wall of a civil rights institution despite having profited from the opposite of civil rights for their entire careers. But "Visionaries" — that implies they see something. That they saw the future. That they were ahead of the curve. It makes their money feel like prophecy rather than payment.
The man who ran against Wall Street built his monument with Wall Street money. The donors call it gratitude. I call it closing the loop. The schoolchildren who will tour this building in September will learn about a man who promised to hold power accountable, and they will learn this in rooms named after power, and they will not see the names, and they will not ask who paid, and that is the system working exactly as I designed it to work.
You are welcome.