Braam Jordaan

My comments, re-tweets or likes do not represent any business, political party, sports team etc, but are my own#

[Braam Jordaan @aj_jor]

@ArthurMacwaters And shut it down

[Braam Jordaan @aj_jor]

@pookiepolls Legend💪 🏄

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Reality Denied

Elon Musk’s interview with The Economist exposed a political absurdity: basic common sense now sounds radical because the elite progressive left has spent years treating reality as a nuisance rather than a guide. Secure borders, safe streets, fiscal restraint, and institutional competence are not fringe positions. They are the minimum requirements of a serious society.

That is why the debate has become so warped. Too much of the progressive left now operates in a post-factual universe, where ideology is treated as evidence and evidence is treated as negotiable. In that environment, ordinary standards of order and accountability are recast as oppression, while failure is excused with slogans.

The same argument would be celebrated as wisdom if Obama made it and denounced as extremism when Trump does.

The result is a public discourse detached from consequences. If you point out that uncontrolled migration strains public services, that crime affects working families first, or that governments cannot borrow and spend forever, you are no longer making a practical argument. You are accused of hostility, ignorance, or worse.

Musk’s real value in this conversation is not that he is universally right. Which he is. It is that he forces the confrontation between reality and rhetoric. And once that confrontation happens, the weakness of the left’s worldview becomes obvious: it can explain feelings, but it cannot reliably explain facts.

The middle of the political spectrum has not become more extreme. The left has simply moved so far from reality that common sense now looks like rebellion.

[Christian @InTheTrenchesUK]

Well well well, Zanny fucking Minton Beddoes.

Susan Jean Elisabeth, if we're being proper. Which we absolutely are not.

The Economist's very own cosmopolitan mannequin, fresh from her latest triumph: explaining to a man who builds actual rockets that she knows better than he does what "normal people" think. And wouldn't you know it, the silly billionaire had the absolute gall to tell her that a lot more people hate her and her rancid little magazine than she realizes. The look on her face, darlings. The look.

Oh darling, let's unpack this steamer trunk of establishment hypocrisy, shall we?

One must admire the sheer audacity of a woman who can sit there in her Hammersmith townhouse, where the worst thing that happens is cold coffee at a dinner party. We're talking serious landed gentry here, father an Army officer, mother straight out of central casting for "European sophistication." And from this fortress of privilege she lectures the rest of us about diversity and inclusion while her own magazine admits, whoopsie, only 0.9% of the 230 editorial staff are Black. Seven years she's been editor. Seven years of "we can do better." The numbers haven't budged. But do go on about structural racism, Zanny. We're all ears.

This is, after all, the same Oxford PPE, Harvard Kennedy School, IMF shock therapy alumnus who helped destroy Eastern European economies in the 90s and called it "experience." The same sneering metropolitan globalist who sold The Economist's independence to Italian industrialists (the Agnelli family, darling, Fiat and Ferrari and all that) for £469 million, then had the absolute gall to issue a statement about "preserving editorial independence." The same Bilderberg director, yes actual Bilderberg, Companies House and everything, who sits in secret rooms with intelligence chiefs and CEOs deciding your future without your input, then returns to her magazine to tell you why you should be grateful for open borders.

How very revealing.

And when Rupert Lowe, one of England's finest gentlemen, a true patriot who crowdfunded the independent rape gang inquiry report that exposed industrial scale horror, dared to speak truth, she insulted him. Dismissed him. Treated him like dirt beneath her expensive shoes. While he was single handedly dismantling the establishment, she was smearing saviours. This is the same champagne socialist who has spent years openly loathing Brexit, patriotism, and anyone gauche enough to have voted Leave. She treated half the country with the sort of withering contempt usually reserved for a waiter who brought the wrong vintage.

Which brings us to July 23, 2026. There she is, across from Elon Musk, dismissing the systematic rape of 250,000 British girls as "sort of grooming gangs everywhere." Telling him London is "much safer than any city in the United States" while girls are trafficked, rapped, tortured and groomed in Rochdale. Accusing him of being "far right" for wanting secure borders and safe cities.

July 24, 2026. One day later. Jordan Peterson publishes: "250,000 girls were raped."

While Zanny was minimizing horror, Peterson was confronting it. While she was calling critics "far right," he was counting bodies. While she was claiming London was "safe," the mothers of raped daughters were being ignored by people exactly like her.

How very BBC. How very Economist. How very fucking typical.

You didn't report the news, Zanny. You auditioned for the role of its self-appointed globalist gatekeeper. When Steve Bannon needed a platform, you were there. When actual patriots needed a voice, you were smearing them. When the IDF offered controlled access, you embedded and called it journalism.

Bless your heart.

You absolute, rancid establishment whore of a woman. The British people have had more than enough of your poisonous, traitorous carcass and your magazine that lectures them while selling them out. So do be a dear and slither back into whatever pathetic little Davos afterparty the actual producers of the world had the good sense to exclude your toxic arse from.

Your time is over, Zanny. The curtain has fallen, the lights are dead, and all that remains is the fading stench of your smug hypocrisy hanging in a Bilderberg conference room that no one voted for.

Zanny, you and your kind have made us hate in a way we never thought possible. We now don't care what you call us. We would much rather be called racist than let our daughters get raped by your guests.

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

Here I fixed it for you @TheEconomist:

Why should the Economist be able to shape American politics? You don't even live there.

Why does this magazine, that has so much power, think it has the right to influence our politics?

[Critically Thinking & Drinking 🧐 🥃🧉🍸🍹🤪 @TheCriticalDri1]

Sara Bareilles singing Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in a way that will both give you chills and choke up. The absolute PIPES on her WOW!!! #CTDDJ

[Rassie Erasmus @RassieRugby]

💙🇿🇦

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.

Let me get this straight, because I want to make sure I am reading your economics homework correctly, and I did not eat a bowl of alphabet soup this morning so bear with me. You just listed UnitedHealth's $5.48 billion quarterly profit as proof of corporate greed. Cute. Except that profit happened WHILE the Affordable Care Act — the law that guarantees these insurers a captive, subsidized, taxpayer-fed customer base — has been the law of the land for fifteen years. You are not exposing corporate greed, Senator. You are reading me the receipt for your own bill. The ACA did not shrink the insurance industry. It turned it into a government-guaranteed cash cow, and now you are shocked, SHOCKED, that the cow got fat. Eats soup with a fork, this one.

And here is the part that should really sting. Your own party just finished a 43-day shutdown demanding MORE money be poured into that exact system, because the temporary COVID subsidies YOUR PARTY wrote into the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — zero Republican votes on either bill, by the way — expired right on schedule, exactly as YOU designed them to. Not a single Republican voted to end those subsidies. You did. Then you shut down the government to admit, out loud, on the record, that a law literally named the AFFORDABLE Care Act cannot survive without emergency pandemic cash. That is not an insult from me. That is a confession from you.

So now the solution is Medicare for All. Naturally. Because when a fifteen-year-old government program made the insurance companies richer, the answer is obviously MORE government program, just bigger. If ignorance is bliss you must be the happiest man in the Senate. Independent estimates put full single-payer implementation at somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the ENTIRE federal budget. Forty to sixty percent, Senator. Larger than Social Security. Larger than defense. You want me to hand over half the country's checkbook to the same apparatus that just admitted its last healthcare experiment doesn't work without a subsidy IV drip.

Let's talk about who's asking. You have served in the United States government for something like forty years between the House and Senate, and by my count the bills you personally got across the finish line as lead sponsor could be counted on one hand, mostly involving the naming of federal buildings. Somewhere out there is a tree tirelessly producing oxygen for you, Senator, and it owes itself an apology for the return on investment. This is also the same man who, as a young idealist, tried out communal living on a hippie commune and did not exactly stick around long enough to collect a pension from it. Now you want the reins to fifty percent of the national budget. I keep hearing "tax the rich" out of a man worth several million dollars who charters private jets on his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour because, in his own words, he isn't waiting in line at United with the rest of us peasants. Bless your heart. That is rich even by Congressional standards. Couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel, but sure, hand him the checkbook.

And before you tell me capitalism failed and it's finally socialism's turn — how's that working out for your ideological younger brother in New York? Zohran Mamdani just announced a THIRTY MILLION DOLLAR government grocery store in a city his own comptroller says is worse than broke. Kansas City tried this. Erie, Kansas tried this. That is not a hunch, Senator, that is a lab result, and I am a science teacher, so let me walk you through the peer review.

An experiment only counts as science if it has been REPLICATED. Not run once. Run again. And again. Under different conditions, different continents, different decades, different "well THIS time we'll do it right" true believers standing at the podium. So let's replicate it together, shall we, because apparently nobody handed you the lab notes.

Trial one: the USSR, 1920s and 1930s. Stalin seized the farms, collectivized the kulaks, and centrally planned the harvest. Result: the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine that starved somewhere between five and ten million people to death while grain was actively being EXPORTED past their starving bodies. That is not a rounding error. That is a control group that died.

Trial two: Cuba, 1959 onward. Castro nationalized every business, every farm, every bank on the island. Sugar production, once the envy of the hemisphere, collapsed. The economy shrank thirty-five percent in a single decade when the Soviet training wheels came off. Extreme poverty today sits near eighty-eight percent. Same experiment. Same result.

Trial three: Venezuela, sitting on some of the largest oil reserves on the PLANET, nationalized its oil industry and ran the socialist playbook to the letter. Production collapsed from three and a half million barrels a day to under one million. Hyperinflation peaked past sixty-three THOUSAND percent. Nine million people fled. You cannot bribe your way out of the results with oil money. We tried. It's in the data.

Trial four, and this one should make every teacher in America wince: China's Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962. Mao abolished private farming, herded peasants into communes, melted down their pots and pans for backyard steel that was too low-grade to use for anything. Somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people starved. Some regions saw cannibalism. That is not a typo. That is what happens when central planners replace the price system with a five-year plan and a slogan.

Trial five: North Korea, present day, running the same command economy with the Juche twist. Famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands to over a million. Markets are technically illegal and thrive anyway in the shadows, because human beings will trade even when their government threatens to shoot them for it.

Trial six is my personal favorite because it is the cleanest natural experiment in the history of economics: East versus West Germany. Same people. Same language. Same culture. Same starting point in 1945. One half got markets, one half got the Stasi and collectivized industry. East German productivity settled at roughly thirty to seventy-five percent of the West's, and the population had to build a WALL to stop its own citizens from swimming, tunneling, and hot-air-ballooning their way out. Nobody builds a wall to keep people from fleeing prosperity, Senator.

Trial seven: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975 to 1979. They abolished money entirely. No markets. No private property. Total state control, straight out of the textbook you apparently keep on your nightstand. One point seven to three million people, roughly a quarter of the country, died of starvation, overwork, and execution in FOUR YEARS.

And for the extra credit column: Ethiopia's Derg collectivization, Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, Yugoslavia's market-socialism ceiling, Vietnam before it finally abandoned the model, India's decades of License Raj stagnation, and Poland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc running factories that burned three times the steel per unit of output compared to the free market next door. Every single trial, same hypothesis, same result. I have seen middle schoolers design better controlled experiments during a volcano science fair.

That is not one anecdote, Bernie. That is a stack of peer-reviewed, historically documented, independently verified trials spanning four continents and a full century, and the conclusion section reads the same every time: shortages, queues, corruption, and a body count north of a hundred million people once you tally every collectivized farm, every purged kulak, and every commune that ran out of rice. If an experiment fails this many times in this many labs, a real scientist stops blaming the equipment and starts questioning the hypothesis. You, apparently, would rather run trial number eight on 340 million Americans and call it "finally getting it right." Trying to reason with some folks really is like trying to baptize a cat.

Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You want cheaper healthcare, you get record insurer profits. You want affordable food, you get a thirty-million-dollar failed grocery store. You want to fight the oligarchy, you fly private. Every single time. Set your watch by it.

I keep asking Democrats this question and I never get an answer: what have YOU actually done to help people, versus just handing out someone else's money? Because handouts without a ladder out is not compassion. It is a leash. And I think deep down you know that, Senator, or you wouldn't need the private jet to get away from the people you claim to be fighting for. You're about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to actually running anything, but boy can you point fingers.

You are the human version of period cramps on this topic, Bernie, and I mean that with the utmost respect for a man who has spent forty years discovering new ways to spend money he didn't earn. Has a leak in the think tank if he genuinely believes THIS is the moment socialism finally works. Unless your name is Google, Senator, you need to stop acting like you know everything about running an economy you have personally never had to run.

But what do I know. I am only a medically retired Army combat medic and a science teacher who actually reads the Congressional Budget Office numbers before I open my mouth about a trillion-dollar healthcare takeover.

@JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks #MAGA #Veterans #Trump

[Chad Prather @WatchChad]

One president used a prime time speech to brand millions of Americans "domestic terrorists."

The other revealed intelligence of a foreign superpower meddling in our elections, stealing our voter data, and creating fake ballots.

Guess which story NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN amplified and which one they buried.

The corporate media is 100% the enemy of this nation.

[Tee Times @TeeTimesPub]

If Bryson DeChambeau wins #TheOpen I will send one random person who likes AND reposts this post $1,000.

Must be following to win.

Let’s have a fun week! 🔥

[Acclaimed Journalist @Jonathan_Witt]

Is everyone dead from Hantavirus and Ebola yet?

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

In a world of takers, be a maker. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

[Gunther Eagleman™ @GuntherEagleman]

🚨BADASS ALERT: Patriot Parachute Team Drops In!

Former Navy SEALs and Special Ops veterans just flew giant American flags into the Cody Stampede Rodeo for America’s 250th!

This is patriotism looks like, elite warriors honoring our country from the sky!

[Braam Jordaan @aj_jor]

@RoryDuncan1966 Beautiful- “country roads, take me home” …… to the Klein Karoo….

[Braam Jordaan @aj_jor]

@KP24 Koesplapped

[Acclaimed Journalist @Jonathan_Witt]

@ConceptualJames Also, and I can not state this enough, they were not in fact “promised no new wars”. What they were promised was peace through strength which it turns out sometimes involves displays of strength.

[Richard Wilkinson @wilkinsoncape]

Anyone who went through the University of Cape Town in the first quarter of the 21st Century will instantly recognise and understand this.

The ideology of decolonisation - which Mamdani's father developed at the University of Cape Town.

[Buzz Patterson @BuzzPatterson]

This is surprisingly beautiful. @McConaughey lays out America’s 250th Birthday. Watch this and listen to the words.

This is powerful.

[AJ Kay @AJKayWriter]

@WSJ The real question is how so many people became convinced that men can be women in the first place.

Let’s talk about how *that* happened.