Brit Hume

Chief Political Analyst, Fox News Channel. Arguments welcome. Name callers & verbal abusers blocked.

[Brit Hume @brithume]

@ZitoSalena @Fortligonier58 Thank you Salena.

[Brit Hume @brithume]

I just narrated this. The producers and crew did the real work. It turned out well. Very compelling story, now being researched in the dirt in Western Pennsylvania.

[Fort Ligonier @Fortligonier58]

"The Day Washington Almost Died" with Brit Hume on FoxOne and @Foxnation, tells the discovery of a lost George Washington battlefield just miles away from Fort Ligonier.

View on Fox Nation: https://t.co/9HzMvoon1N

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

Disgusting does not begin to capture how sick and pathetic this is.

This type of immoral pragmatism is exactly why the war against the Iranians, 47 years overdue, is where it now stands. By April 7 we had essentially eliminated their military capacity. Israel said it was ready to return to battle at any moment, and its defense minister later said it was only waiting on a green light from Washington. What did the administration do instead? It took a two week ceasefire brokered by Pakistan, extended it indefinitely, and has spent the months since chasing a deal with the regime it had beaten. And this goes to the top. Trump is Commander in Chief, even though every one of his worshipers wants to give him a pass every time.

On July 8, the day that ceasefire collapsed, Brit Hume said on Fox that Trump had reached his moment of truth on Iran. This is not a regime you can make a deal with and expect it to keep its word, Hume said, and the president now recognized that any enforceable deal was probably impossible. Hume was right. Less than four weeks later Trump paused the attacks again because, he said, the outlines of a deal had been agreed to. The administration reached its moment of truth and flinched, and a once in a lifetime chance to end the regime went down the toilet.

Now Vance, a man who should never be President, wants to meet with a murderer who would kill him in 30 seconds given the chance, to make a nonexistent deal that keeps insane theocratic murderers in power.

An American vice president hat in hand before an Interpol fugitive is a new low for a party that once claimed it would never negotiate with terrorists.

[Fox News @FoxNews]

BREAKING: House Republicans shut down Rep. Thomas Massie’s effort to impeach War Secretary Pete Hegseth, with no other Republican joining him in opposing the move.

Download the Fox News app or go to https://t.co/2BRjQcVthD for more.

[Bill Melugin @BillMelugin_]

BREAKING: Sen. Majority Leader John Thune has been re-elected by Senate Republicans and will serve as Senate Minority Leader in the new Congress when Dems take power. Senators Barrasso, Cotton, Capito, and Lankford have all also been re-elected to their positions. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) will now serve as NRSC Chairman instead of Sen. Tim Scott.

[Brit Hume @brithume]

Congratulations to @marthamaccallum on publication of her new book! I have a copy. It's beautifully written and elegantly published. It's a great antidote to much of what is being fed to kids these days about our country.

[Brit Hume @brithume]

True.

[Handre @Handre]

The government taxes you when you earn money, taxes you when you spend it, taxes you when you invest it, and then taxes your children when you die. The federal estate tax currently kicks in at 40% on estates above $13.61 million, a threshold the Biden administration repeatedly tried to lower. Washington frames this as targeting dynastic wealth. It actually targets a lifetime of accumulated savings, already taxed multiple times over.

Property rights mean nothing if the state can confiscate your accumulated capital the moment your heart stops. Murray Rothbard put private property at the foundation of liberty for exactly this reason: ownership that evaporates at death is not ownership. It is a revocable license the state issues and reclaims at will.

Consider a family farm in Iowa worth $15 million on paper, generating $200,000 a year in real income. The heirs owe $540,000 in federal estate taxes within nine months of death. They did not get $540,000. They got a farm. So they sell it, usually to a corporate agricultural buyer, which is a funny outcome for a tax rhetorically aimed at breaking up concentrated wealth.

The capital your grandfather spent forty years building represents deferred consumption, resources he chose not to spend. Taxing that capital destroys it. This process doesn't redistribute purchasing power; it rather converts productive assets into government expenditure, removing them from capital markets where they would have funded jobs, equipment, and future production.

Calling this anything other than state-sanctioned inheritance confiscation requires genuine ideological commitment to the fiction that the state has a prior claim on what you built.

[TV News Now @TVNewsNow]

NEW: Fox’s @BritHume warns the Hegseth impeachment push could land in a Democratic Senate:

“Even if the Senate hasn’t acted, it carries over… the next Senate, Democratic-controlled, would handle the vote.”

[Clifford Asness @CliffordAsness]

Ross is a conservative journalist not masquerading as anything. Ignorant nonsense.

[Brit Hume @brithume]

Correct.

[Clifford Asness @CliffordAsness]

Your occasional reminder that “RINO” now means believing in things Republicans have championed for 50+ years. Things that worked to make this country great (see what I did there?). Free markets, free trade, conservative values, love of country, and limited government just to start. Believing in these things make you a “RINO.”

To not be “RINO” you need to believe in right-wing socialism, regressive protectionism, and extreme executive authority, just to start.

Got it?

[Brit Hume @brithume]

I started listening to it too. It was truly awful.

[Ken Gardner @KenGardner11]

I am listening to, or was listening to until I couldn't take it any more, NRO's The editors post-election episode. You all sound like radical environmentalists who argue whether human beings are solely responsible for global warming. Then one guy (the obvious Vanceguard guy who hates the Iran war, you all know who I mean) argues for that position and the others (again with one possible exception, you all probably know who I mean) gives lip service to some but not all of the other causal factors, but still lose the forest for the trees.

Get away from your microphones and look up Mill's methods (a topic in logic). Learn it. Live it. Love it. Then reassess your entire approach to what actually happened.

If you need a hint about the right way to think about the election and, accordingly, what needs to be done going forward, go back and read David Bahnsen's piece in NRO on the same topic. You don't even have to look outside your own organization; you published it.

Good grief, NRO podcast people. Learn how to make a good intellectual argument.

[Special Report @SpecialReport]

THE CORRUPTION FACTOR: "When times are tough and we’re going through an economic transformation of an extraordinary degree and prices are high, even though jobs are plentiful, people are hurting... They look at Washington, they see the President... suddenly several billion dollars richer... They see his sons involved in cryptocurrency businesses... They don’t like the looks of that." @brithume

[Will Ricciardella @WillRicci]

Nothing about this is conservative, and the word shouldn’t be given to the men holding those signs.

The left spent decades sorting Americans by race and giving every group an enemy.

Some on the right said, “fine, our turn.”

Conservatives already had the answer to race politics — one law for everybody, including the Hindu family in Seattle.

These guys picked a tribe and joined the race war instead.

That’s the reactionary New Right.

Right-wing, yes. Conservative, not at all.

[Special Report @SpecialReport]

NO EASY ANSWERS ON DIVESTMENT: "The President is in a tight spot there. He says that his sons are running this business even though he’s a part owner, he has no say in the matter, he’s not even aware of what they’re doing. He might have a better answer if he were more aware or could admit to being more aware, but he can’t really do that. So he’s stuck there on his answer on why he didn’t simply divest... It was well-put to him by Ross Douthat reminded me of you, the way he interviewed him: polite but penetrating. I thought it was a good interview. I don’t think the President has a good answer on this subject." @brithume

[Brit Hume @brithume]

This -->

[Rich Lowry @RichLowry]

This really gets to the crux of the matter re Trump, Vance and Iran, which isn’t whether the war badly hurt Republicans in the midterms or not (obviously it did).

It’s whether or not Trump botched one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency. Vance clearly thinks he did, while Trump—absent a stark turnabout—is never going to concede that he did.

Maybe Vance finds a way to cleverly finesse this question, or Trump gives him a pass on it, or other considerations prevail, but it is very treacherous territory for a VP to have such a dim view of a such a major decision made by the president whose favor he needs to win his party’s nomination.

The question some journalist is going to ask Vance now is, “Do you agree with the president that the war was right call, and that, if he had it to do over again, he should do it again?”

Trump’s statement suggested the answer he wants to hear.

[Brit Hume @brithume]

Ross Douthat's questioning of Trump on this was polite, persistent and revealing. A model for how to interrogate a president: non-hostile, respectful but penetrating. Good for him.

[60 Minutes @60Minutes]

Ross Douthat asks the President how his net worth rose by nearly $3 billion, according to a Forbes estimate, since he returned to office.

Watch the interview Sunday at 7 p.m. ET/PT on 60 Minutes.

[Brit Hume @brithume]

This is from a fascinating exchange between the unnamed writer below and Mark Cuban on health care and who should pay for it.

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

Mark, you started by saying we have no idea what healthcare costs to buy or to provide in this country. None. Then your conclusion is to propose that the people who cannot see the costs should be the ones to run it.

There is a reason nobody knows what anything costs, and you listed it yourself. Medicaid, Medicare, supplemental plans, Medicare Advantage, self insured employers under a tax code that hides the premium in the paycheck. Every layer you named is a government program or a government created structure, and in every one of them the person getting the care is not the person paying for it. That is where the price went. Prices exist where buyers pay. Remove the buyer and you get exactly the fog you are describing. Universal care removes every buyer who is left.

Then look at what you are asking for. Every private contract in the industry published by federal order. Every claim in the country handed to state and federal researchers. The DOJ turned loose on the pricing structure. Bipartisan legislation to work out what care we need to provide and what it should cost. That is not a market reform. That is the state seizing the information of an entire industry so it can set the terms of trade for every doctor, hospital, and patient in the country. You call the conglomerates Too Big To Care. The entity you want running it is the only one with a monopoly on force.

And the number. The post you are replying to has CBO at $3 trillion a year in new federal spending, 21.4 percent of payroll, with the author conceding it is illustrative and not scored. You respond that nobody knows the real cost and we should find out after we commit. No investor you have ever met would fund a company on those terms, and you have never funded one that way yourself. Only government gets to spend money first and discover the price later, because only government can send the bill to people who did not agree to it.

The information asymmetry you are describing is not a reason to negotiate blind. It is a reason to stop having a single buyer negotiating at all. Put the patient back in the transaction and prices appear on their own. Cost Plus is proof that you already know this.

Mises showed a century ago that a planner without prices cannot calculate, Hayek showed why the knowledge he needs is never in one place, and Rand showed why he has no right to try. You are proposing to prove all three wrong with a commission while you admit no one has any idea how much all of it will cost. Do you think they did not know what they were talking about, or do you just not want to find out?

[Joel Pollak @joelpollak]

By the way, the facts: ICE took an illegal alien to the hospital. When word got out that agents were there, radical protesters targeted the hospital. The "US citizens" who were detained weren't targets of an ICE raid -- they were *targeting the agents*. You're already a disgrace.

[Brit Hume @brithume]

Exceptionally bright, well-informed and highly articulate. Probably not whom you would send out to negotiate with Democrats if you were looking to be conciliatory.

[Fox News @FoxNews]

BREAKING: President Trump announces Stephen Miller will become his new White House chief of staff starting Monday, replacing Susie Wiles.

Miller, currently Trump's deputy chief of staff and a longtime trusted adviser, is set to take over one of the most influential positions in the administration.

Trump thanks Wiles for her "outstanding service" and says she will transition to his political operation.

Download the FOX News app for the latest details: https://t.co/BAyV31y5kz

[Susie Wiles @SusieWiles47]

Today is my last day as White House Chief of Staff.  

Serving President Trump in the White House has been the honor of a lifetime. I’m so proud to have been a part of what we’ve accomplished together from securing our border and cutting taxes to strengthening our economy and putting America First.

More than anything, I’m grateful for the extraordinary people I’ve had the privilege of working alongside. While my role may be changing, my commitment to the President and the mission never will.