When I was a kid, the Bronx was burning. My dad was a fireman who happened to be an Ivy League graduate.
He told me it wasn’t the crackheads torching the city, whatever the news said. It was fraud.
Let me explain how it worked…. John Doe buys a rundown apartment building for $100k. He pockets the redevelopment tax break, then sells it to Joe Doe for $250k. Joe pockets the tax break, then sells it to Jerry Doe for $500k. Rinse and repeat until the building is worth $5 million.
The tax breaks are real. The money is not.
Because the buyers are all family, the cash flows out of Swiss bank account 27852 and right back into 27852 after every sale. There’s a transaction cost, sure, but the tax breaks more than cover it.
Then comes the payoff: they insure the building for $5 million and burn it down.
The name for this was “Jewish Lightning.” The phrase stuck around not because the landlords were all Jewish, but because the stereotype hit a nerve in a city run by Jewish mayors from 1974 to 1989, the peak of the burning. Fair or not, the term stuck.
So why was none of this investigated? NGO funding, of course.
The NYPD union was powerful, and NYC detectives had sweeping investigative authority over almost everything. Except arson. Arson belonged to FDNY detectives. NGOs, routing money through union donations, stoked the rivalry between cops and firemen.
Long story short, arson investigators got no funding and zero cooperation from the NYPD.
No money for investigations means no arrests.
Eventually the Bronx ran out of buildings to burn, and Giuliani drove the final nail into arson fraud’s coffin.
But the lesson survived, and it’s the foundation of today’s fraud. The lesson was this: the actual value of the asset doesn’t matter.
👉What matters is the movement of money.
Destruction is still very profitable. When the Baltimore bridge collapsed, the cleanup and rebuild were estimated at $1.7 billion, with the bridge reopening in 2028. The cost has since ballooned to $5.2 billion, and the wreckage still isn’t fully cleared.
Money pours into demolition,, engineering, environmental review, project management, waste removal.
But if the work doesn’t actually get done, the real expenses stay low. The money moves; the bridge doesn’t.
And here’s the leap: you don’t have to destroy anything at all. You just have to not build it.
Democrats allocate money to a government body, which hands it to a project manager, who hires consultants, who hire subcontractors, who hire more subcontractors, who funnel it back to Democrats, who allocate more money.
The fewer the actual costs (labor, materials, equipment) the more of the flow you can capture.
And if a taxpayer complains, you hire a PR firm and a few consultants to explain why costs keep exploding while nothing gets built. The easiest thing to blame is red tape.
So why does red tape exist?
Because destroying valuable property, while profitable, is too obviously unethical.
Burning buildings gets you arrested, eventually. Not building gets you a ribbon-cutting and a press release.
Here’s the deeper trap. Because our most valuable assets are fixed (houses, cars, index funds) we think of money as static. You have what you have. It grows over time, but it doesn’t flow.
That’s exactly where the fraud lives: in the flow.
The light bulb moment was realizing you don’t need to destroy physical property. You only need to destroy productivity.
If labor and materials are never purchased while money pours in, the fraud works.
You don’t have to build or destroy anything of value, just productivity. You just announce a project and start writing checks while throwing up enough red tape to block any real spending on labor and materials.
This is basically why Congress handed @PeteButtigieg $1.2 trillion and our roads and bridges still suck five years later. They put up signs, traffic cones, and red tape, and little else.
But there are a few residual problems. 1/2
When you realize the intro of the famous song "Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple is the intro of Beethoven's 5th Symphony simply played backward.
Mind-blowing.
🚨 IT'S OFFICIAL: After a JAW-DROPPING report, Elon Musk says all UK politicians who "turned a blind eye to the r*pe of Britain must go to PRISON"
Some of them were BRANDED with "M" for Mohammed 🤯
He's right.
**250,000** victims estimated NATIONWIDE. Whites were the target.
WILL CAIN: "The numbers in the report are absolutely staggering. Around 87% of those convicted in the group based child s*x exploitation are distinctively Muslim names. The report cites evidence of grooming gang activity in 149 different areas in the UK."
"And get this, an estimated 250,000 victims nationwide. In one case alone, 47 children were identified as victims. Britain launched a national review of closed grooming gang investigations last year to re-look at 1200 cases, including 236 involving r*pe."
Dear Senator Cornyn,
I approached you respectfully at the airport, extending my hand & introducing myself.
We were at the ticket gate with literally dozens of witnesses — passengers inches away.
Despite a quib reply back from you, I kept things professional & focused on the SAVE America Act.
While I respect that you say you want to ensure wins this November, I speak for millions when I say that voters will be more likely to vote upon the passage of the SAVE America Act.
Voters see what’s happening in California & wonder why our Senate isn’t doing everything in its power to secure our elections.
Did you know that former Congresswoman Michelle Steel (R-CA) lost by 653 votes in 2024? Did you know that former Congressman John Duarte (R-CA) lost by 187 votes?
I have no doubt that the SAVE America Act would have prevented these losses.
Why are we normalizing an expectation for California to count votes for weeks after Election Day — like Spencer Pratt’s election.
In North Carolina, the State Board of Elections found 34,000 dead voters on the voter rolls — fact-check me. (CC: Senator Tillis)
How can Americans have confidence in our elections & how are Americans going to be inspired to vote if you don’t legislate as the majority?
Last — & I mean this with the utmost of respect — for the $150 million that was spent on the Texas Senate primary/runoff,
we could have built massive voter registration/get out the vote operations in every single swing state.
While I understand it might be difficult to contemplate an American citizen doing this work because it’s the right thing to do, I’m proud to say that I don’t take PAC $ — not even from my own organization.
I can’t be bought, which frustrates the political establishment.
My one singular mission is doing right by the American people and delivering legislative wins that the popular vote delivered in 2024.
I’m on the way to the Texas GOP Convention to help ensure all of our Republican candidates win this November — I hope you’ll do the same.
I hope you’ll do the right thing & encourage your colleagues to pass the SAVE America Act — let’s win big.
🚨 WOW! President Trump GOES OFF on RINO Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski for OPPOSING the SAVE America Act and other MAGA policies
"MURKOWSKI IS TERRIBLE! Terrible to US, terrible to our COUNTRY! And I've done almost more for Alaska than any other state. She's an impediment! She's there, she will probably be a negative vote."
"@RandPaul has come a long way! He likes SAVE America!"
She needs to be primaried! ALASKA IS DEEP-RED.
I’m truly angry that our Republican Senate majority is incapable &/or unwilling to pass the SAVE America Act.
So, I’m going to turn my anger into organized action.
See you this SATURDAY, Arizona!
CC: @TPAction