Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Paper ballots are the smartest, safest way to ensure your vote is secure against attacks by foreign actors. Russia can’t hack a piece of paper like they can a computer. We introduced the Secure Elections Act to ensure our elections are safeguarded. We must be ready.
We dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, twice, and 80 years later they light up their cities in our colors as a show of how much they love us.
Meanwhile, we bailed half of Europe out, twice, and their governments take every last opportunity to signal how much they despise us.
250 years ago today, on June 29, 1776, New Yorkers looked out at the water and saw a nightmare on the horizon. The British fleet had arrived, and so many ships filled the bay that witnesses said the masts looked like "a forest of pine trees" growing out of the sea. The timing could not have been more brutal.
This was the empire's answer to the rebellion, and it was overwhelming. The first wave of around 45 warships and transports dropped anchor off Sandy Hook and Staten Island carrying General William Howe and roughly 10,000 troops. Within days it kept growing. Then his brother Admiral Richard Howe arrived with more. It would eventually swell into one of the largest seaborne invasion forces of the entire 18th century, hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of professional soldiers and German mercenaries, aimed at one city.
Now sit with the timing. While that forest of masts was filling the harbor, delegates down in Philadelphia were in the final days of debating whether to declare independence. They voted for it on July 2 and signed off on the wording on July 4. So at the exact moment America was being born on paper, the most powerful military on earth was already anchored off its coast, getting ready to strangle it in the cradle.
The people of New York understood exactly what they were seeing. Alarm bells rang, panic spread through the streets, and soldiers sprinted to their posts to stare at a force they had almost no hope of matching. Washington's army was outnumbered, outgunned, and about to get badly beaten in the battles for New York that followed.
That's the part that gets lost in the fireworks every Fourth of July. Independence wasn't declared from a position of strength. It was declared with an enemy armada already sitting on the doorstep, knowing full well what was coming. They signed their names anyway.
🚨 IT’S OFFICIAL: The South Dakota GOP Sergeant at Arms has been FIRED after denying Scott Presler entry to an event with Leader John Thune
The party chairman has now APOLOGIZED to Presler:
“I want to personally apologize for how things were handled tonight at the SD GOP Convention…Matt Bruner has been relieved of his duties as one of our Sergeant at Arms by the lead Sergeant at Arms.”
The GOP should know by now that peaceful FAFO is always waiting!
Keep pushing, @ScottPresler 🇺🇸
Since our movement is trending right now, let me introduce myself:
My name is Scott Presler.
I’m an Eagle Scout & son of a retired Navy Captain.
I moved to Pennsylvania in 2024 & launched an organization for the sole purpose of helping to re-elect President Trump.
I’ve spent the last decade of my life registering tens of thousands of voters, electing Republicans to all levels of office, & helping to build up Republican structures from the county & state levels.
I’ve traveled to over 40 states to grow the Republican Party.
For the last 6 months, I’ve met with members of Congress to pass the SAVE America Act — which would require photo voter ID & proof of citizenship to vote.
What I’m advocating for has overwhelming support from the American people.
Yet I was not allowed entry to a dinner last night in Rapid City, South Dakota, because Senate Majority Leader Thune was present.
When they go after me, they are really coming for you.
I will not be bullied, pressured, intimidated & I won’t stop pushing for the country-saving SAVE America Act.
Thank you for having my back — peacefully.
I don't know what broke in the matrix, but watching John Bolton not only plead guilty to a felony but the specific felony he spent decades depicting as the most egregious -- calling for life imprisonment or execution for it -- is a level of karmic justice I didn't know existed.
I would like to see you make a voluntary contribution of 5% of your family’s $200M net worth to the government for important healthcare, childcare, and jobs. Don’t worry, it’s just one-time. Your $10M contribution will provide free childcare for over 1,000 California kids for a year! Once you’ve made your personal contribution to a more just and equitable society, I’ll support all your other asset seizure ideas. But you gotta go first…
The great lie is that society is divided between rich and poor.
The great truth, as David Friedberg puts it, is makers vs takers.
Makers build, create, and deliver real value: houses, software, art, businesses, and everything that moves civilization forward.
Takers watch, criticize, analyze, and politic. They push the lie that the rich hoard unfairly so the poor must seize it… all while positioning themselves to rule the chaos.
As @friedberg tells his kids: “At the end of the day, if you made something and someone else valued it, you were a maker. That was an amazing achievement. That is a great day.”
Takers thrive on division. Makers drive progress.
Time to choose your side.
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
Sheryl. Your article exemplifies the biased reporting we have come to expect from you and @nytimes. It was unfair, inimical, and inaccurate. All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove. You evidently never undertook these foundational due diligences. Why let facts obscure a good story?
You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which I’m already intimately familiar. Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff, with my counselors and with outside stakeholders, interspersed with press conferences and other policy announcements.
I am knowledgeable and active on every issue in every division of my department, and I always make the final decisions. I meet with the principals at FDA, NIH, CDC, and my senior counselor every morning, something, I’m told, is unprecedented in HHS history. I try to get out of the office between 4:30 and 6:00 PM, so that I can spend three hours, in quiet, responding to emails. I normally work until 11 PM every night, mostly on phone calls to staff.
In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired. You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility.
I came into this job to change the culture of a broken agency that has presided over the worst decline in public health in American history. Of course I fired people—lots of them! It's an easy task for even the laziest journalist, to comb that flotsam and jetsam for malevolence toward the Trump administration. And of course, this species of journalist will always be able to find disgruntled individuals among the 70,000 employees of the Department from whom to cherry pick "facts" to flesh out a preordained hit piece. All that is required for this brand of journalism is the ethical elasticity that you seem to have in spades. You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it. This is a widely accepted technique in journalism today, but I grew up in an era when it would not have been tolerated by the New York Times.
Ultimately, God puts us all on this earth to search for existential truths. I've tried to instill this mission at HHS by implementing gold standard research to end the regime of politicized science that COVID exposed to the American public. There was a time that journalists were proud to be the fearless and uncompromising champions of truth. Standards have devolved, and journalism is dead. The Times now employs propagandists. Your capitulation to partisanship further compounds your journalistic challenges; since we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important. The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention.
Btw. When I took this job, the building was empty. About 90% of the employees were not coming to work. I changed that, but your newspaper never covers my reforms. Nor did you cover the fact that my predecessor almost never showed up for work here during his four years in office. When we came in, there were still artifacts from the first Trump administration in many of our office drawers because no one showed up for work during the Biden years. Just as Rochelle Walensky spent her entire term as CDC Director in Cambridge, Xavier Becerra reportedly spent most of his term as HHS Secretary in California. (I live in California, but I’ve only been there once in fifteen months).
His only notable accomplishments here were losing 300,000 children, referred to HHS for custody and care, to human traffickers and drug runners, encouraging transgender surgeries, and disabling the entire program-integrity apparatus, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars of theft from my agency. I have set out to find the children Becerra lost. He is now the front-runner for the governor of California. These are not invented stories; they are genuine scandals that the Times will never cover, presumably, because the malefactors are Democrats.
Finally, you criticize me for spending time with the Indian tribes in Alaska. I consider that part of my job. I run the Indian Health Services, and I’ve had unprecedented success in transforming IHS from a backwater to a top priority for this department. I’ve made more trips to Indian country and to Indian health clinics and hospitals than any HHS secretary in history, and I’ve brought Indians into high positions on the sixth floor for the first time in agency history. This is another success story that the Times will never cover.
@muhendisIiktr On the strength of one link, the cable, dependeth on the might of the chain. Who knows when thou mayest be tested, so live that thou bearest the strain. (The Laws of the Navy, 5th stanza).