Waltham Butternut

Grow the liberty garden through constitutional protection of natural rights. Individual sovereignty, community, pluralism, #Bitcoin

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

The ban on social media for children under 16 is an idea that has merits. But the way it is being done is simply a way to force everyone, including adults, to identify themselves online, creating the most powerful surveillance and censorship architecture in human history.

[Waltham Butternut @WaltButternut]

@3rdDownDraws @joeroganhq The only thing people should be blushing about is the mendacity of the left.

[Waltham Butternut @WaltButternut]

@StevenNekhaila GOP needs to sincerely embrace and practice constitutional classical liberalism, walk softly with big stick, and anti-corruption. Or the Dems do. Somebody does, as socialism, fascism, or naive pacifist anarchocapitalism, are not going to cut it.

[Waltham Butternut @WaltButternut]

@clairlemon Has there ever been this much naive support for socialists? It seems hard to believe. Classical liberalism should be the natural outlet for anyone concerned about populist fervor from the left or right, but it seems that nobody even understands its mechanisms and value anymore.

[Waltham Butternut @WaltButternut]

@ConceptualJames @ClassicLibera12 No internet IDs and tyranny.

[Waltham Butternut @WaltButternut]

@LynAldenContact #1 civil liberties and constitutional issue right now. Cypherpunk should always push and inspire but classical liberal rule of law protecting inalienable individual rights, including privacy, anonymity, speech, commerce, is the only long term way to avoid tyranny and conflict.

[Peter Van Valkenburgh @valkenburgh]

Around $3 Trillion dollars were laundered through banks in 2025 despite the warrantless surveillance regimes they facilitate for governments. And they want you to think that people making peer-to-peer transactions on chain are the problem that needs to be outlawed.

[Waltham Butternut @WaltButternut]

@BernieSanders https://t.co/haL8gmD2az

[Yogi @Houseofyogi]

Mamdani is lying to you. He didn't turn a $12B budget deficit to $0.

Spark notes: He inflated the deficit by $8B compared to Adams, brought it back down, then closed the rest with one-off bailout funds from Kathy Hochul who's desperate for a win.

Funny thing is most of you morons believe it. The entire Democratic party is cheering a lie while "cooking" the books.

New York City has been LEGALLY REQUIRED to balance its budget every single year since 1975. State law. The Financial Emergency Act. Passed after the city almost went bankrupt and Gerald Ford told them to drop dead.

Mamdani's own budget message brags this is the 47th consecutive balanced budget. Bloomberg balanced. de Blasio balanced. Adams balanced. Giuliani balanced.

Crediting Mamdani for balancing the budget is like crediting a taxi driver for stopping at a red light.

Now the $12 billion. Adams left office with a projected FY27 gap of $4.69 billion.

So where did the extra eight billion come from?

Mamdani's own team. They walked in and moved hidden spending back onto the books: rental assistance, shelter ops, special ed reimbursements, NYPD overtime. Legit cleanup work.

Then they ran to a podium and called it a deficit they inherited.

They printed the number. Then they took credit for printing the number.

How did they "close" it? Half came from Albany. Hochul wrote a check: $8 billion in state aid over two years.

THIS IS NOT SUSTAINABLE. HE DIDN'T FIX ANYTHING.

Mamdani's signature millionaire's tax? KILLED by Hochul.

Corporate rate hike? KILLED.

Free buses he ran on? KILLED.

CityFHEPS expansion he campaigned on? He's in court right now fighting it.

Then there's the pension trick.

$1.64 billion of the "savings" comes from extending pension amortization from 2032 to 2037.

The Citizens Budget Commission called it "a pension gimmick" that "balances this budget on the backs of future New Yorkers."

William Glasgall, Volcker Alliance, said it "creates a debt that's more expensive than muni bonds."

And the kicker.

The budget IS NOT ADOPTED. Council votes June 30. The state budget the whole thing depends on was still not enacted as of last week.

Out-year gaps under Mamdani's own numbers:
FY2028: $7.1 billion
FY2029: $8.5 billion
FY2030: $9.8 billion

The hole grew $5.4 billion in three months.

So the real headline. Hochul cut a check. Future workers eat the pension bill. The structural deficit is BIGGER than the day he walked in.

They didn't fix anything. They moved it.

The math: $4.69B real gap. $8B from Hochul. $1.64B pension can-kick. $25.9B in future gaps.

He didn't balance the books. But he's gambling your future and kicking the can down the road.

So maybe stop celebrating. But what do I know. Good luck.

[Waltham Butternut @WaltButternut]

@TheAliceSmith Were they liberal or illiberal? Did they believe in inalienable natural rights and that the limited goal of the state was to protect those? We don’t need to throw out the classical liberal baby with the authoritarian bath water and pigeon hole ourselves into anarchy.

[Waltham Butternut @WaltButternut]

@MsMelChen @MrAndyNgo Continuing to confuse progressive leftist (neomarxist) with “liberal” is counterproductive to re-establishing our classical liberal principles, which absolutely are designed to protect the republic from communism.

[Obscura: The Privacy-first VPN @obscuravpn]

Google really went from "don't be evil" to "how can I be as evil as possible".

I don't like you Google, this is monopolistic and incredibly evil.

[Waltham Butternut @WaltButternut]

@Jesse_Leg Maybe we shouldn’t be calling illiberal progressive Marxists “liberal”, and keep that term for classical liberals.

[Waltham Butternut @WaltButternut]

@glukianoff https://t.co/FwG1GrM17N

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

‼️🚨 ALARMING: Google now treats privacy as suspicious behavior by default. Users of GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, /e/OS, and other deGoogled Android phones are being locked out of millions of websites unless they install the exact Google Play Services software they deliberately removed.

GrapheneOS is recommended by the EFF and used by journalists, lawyers, and activists in high-risk environments. The audience most likely to read Google's data practices and refuse its terms is now flagged as fraudulent for that exact decision.

What happened?:
▪️ Google announced "Cloud Fraud Defense" at Cloud Next on April 22-23, 2026, branding it "the next evolution of reCAPTCHA." Existing reCAPTCHA customers were auto-migrated.
▪️ When the system flags traffic as suspicious, the old click-the-bus puzzle is gone. Users get a QR code instead.
▪️ Scanning the QR code requires Google Play Services running on the device. Internet Archive snapshots show this requirement has been live since at least October 2025, silently rolled out for 7 months before anyone noticed.
▪️ No Play Services = no QR scan = locked out.

The bigger picture:
▪️ Google already tried this in 2023. It was called Web Environment Integrity (WEI), and it would have let Google decide which devices were "real enough" to access the web. Standards bodies and the public pushed back hard, and Google killed it. Three years later, the same idea is back, just hidden behind a QR code instead of a browser feature.
▪️ reCAPTCHA runs on millions of websites. Every developer who keeps using it is now, by default, telling deGoogled Android users they're not welcome...

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

‼️🚨 ALARMING: Google now treats privacy as suspicious behavior by default. Users of GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, /e/OS, and other deGoogled Android phones are being locked out of millions of websites unless they install the exact Google Play Services software they deliberately removed.

GrapheneOS is recommended by the EFF and used by journalists, lawyers, and activists in high-risk environments. The audience most likely to read Google's data practices and refuse its terms is now flagged as fraudulent for that exact decision.

What happened?:
▪️ Google announced "Cloud Fraud Defense" at Cloud Next on April 22-23, 2026, branding it "the next evolution of reCAPTCHA." Existing reCAPTCHA customers were auto-migrated.
▪️ When the system flags traffic as suspicious, the old click-the-bus puzzle is gone. Users get a QR code instead.
▪️ Scanning the QR code requires Google Play Services running on the device. Internet Archive snapshots show this requirement has been live since at least October 2025, silently rolled out for 7 months before anyone noticed.
▪️ No Play Services = no QR scan = locked out.

The bigger picture:
▪️ Google already tried this in 2023. It was called Web Environment Integrity (WEI), and it would have let Google decide which devices were "real enough" to access the web. Standards bodies and the public pushed back hard, and Google killed it. Three years later, the same idea is back, just hidden behind a QR code instead of a browser feature.
▪️ reCAPTCHA runs on millions of websites. Every developer who keeps using it is now, by default, telling deGoogled Android users they're not welcome...

[Waltham Butternut @WaltButternut]

@SkepResCenter What is this slop? “Very liberal” would be libertarian or anarcho-capitalst. You’re talking about illiberal progressive neomarxists. We can’t discuss these things intelligently if you have poorly defined terms and confuse political-economic ideas.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

Perfect consistency, actually, when you understand their single ethic. The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.

[Waltham Butternut @WaltButternut]

@hasanthehun People still fall for this mendacious communist bullshit?

[Waltham Butternut @WaltButternut]

@JerryBarnett Time to be clear and use the term classical liberal in opposition to illiberal progressive leftists. The term liberal has been confused, and too many now think neomarxist ideologies are somehow compatible with individual rights-respecting/government-limiting liberalism.

[Waltham Butternut @WaltButternut]

@harryhalpin @nym Interesting to see so many seemingly realizing for first time that an authoritarian government can make anything illegal and punish people even if they can’t directly stop the activity, and that maybe instead of rolling over, they should think about how to limit the government.

[Waltham Butternut @WaltButternut]

@TobiasMuhlhofer @mattwridley Don’t trust, verify - the research design.