Charles Henry

Recovering political junkie, former political blogger, cybersecurity consultant and family man. Hollywood Media politics is my transition drug. #DeSantis2024

[Charles Henry @chuckn0804]

@tootsquared @Houseofyogi I can see my old house from there.

[Charles Henry @chuckn0804]

This is why my family and I left IL and hundreds of thousands do every year. The state of Chicago runs IL and Chicago ruins everything it touches.

[Yogi @Houseofyogi]

Chicago lost the Bears this week. A team that's been in the city since 1921.

They didn't lose them to a bigger market or a better deal. The Bears decided they'd rather be a tenant in Indiana than deal with Illinois for one more year.

Think about how badly you have to run a place for that to be the smart move.

They lost them for two reasons.

The people running Illinois would rather villainize a builder than keep one. And they're bad at their jobs.

In 2021 the Bears spent $197M on the old Arlington Park racetrack.

Before they could break ground, Cook County valued the empty lot at $192M (Bears said $60M). They were salivating at the chance to extort a building that didn't even exist yet.

That fight dragged on for years.

The Bears were ready to put $2B into the stadium. All they wanted was a promise the county wouldn't reassess them into oblivion, plus $855M for infrastructure everyone uses. Roads, transit, utilities. A $3B project, two thirds of it private money pouring into Illinois.

Springfield had since 2021 to get this done. They dragged it to the final night of session, passed it through the Senate at 3:39AM, and the House went home without voting.

So now it's all gone.

The funniest part? This started because Cook County tried to grab the tax early. They knew a built stadium would pay $53M a year. Now they get under $4M on a vacant lot. No jobs, no buildout, no new anything.

Congrats on fighting for scraps and losing the whole prize.

Pritzker: they're "an $8.5B valued business" that doesn't need propping up.

But be smart for a second. Almost every NFL city throws in public money for a stadium. Not charity. The return is real. Tourism, hotels, restaurants, jobs, game days, property tax on a huge development. The math works.

Indiana did the math. While Illinois sat on it for years, Indiana passed a bill in months, put up $1B, and took the team.

And the Bears took a worse deal to get there. In Illinois they were going to own their stadium. In Indiana they rent it from the state. A team that wanted to build its own home gave up ownership just to escape Chicago.

Nobody won but Indiana. The Bears lost their stadium. Illinois lost the team, the $2B, and $53M a year in taxes.

Pritzker after they left: "I wasn't willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money to give it to a billionaire-owned family or team."

There it is. "Billionaire-owned."

That's how Democrats talk about any business right before they run it out of town. Call them a billionaire, act like you're saving working families, take a victory lap while the tax base drives across the state line.

Meanwhile they're running the whole state into the ground. And you already know how this ends. You're living in it.

Pensions are $143B in the hole, worst in the country and not close. You pay $6,285 a year in property taxes, double the $2,969 national average, for a city that's $1.15B in the red. The mayor called its finances "the point of no return."

When you run things this badly, you sell what's left.

They leased the parking meters for 75 years to Morgan Stanley and a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. Took $1.15B and burned through it in two years. The investors already made it all back, with 58 years left to collect.

Sold the Skyway. Sold the downtown garages. Every asset that made money, gone for one check.

But a fixed property tax rate for a team that's been here 106 years? That's "propping up billionaires."

Companies are leaving. Boeing for Virginia. Caterpillar for Texas. Citadel for Miami. In 2023 alone Illinois lost 56,000 people and $6B in income to other states. The ones who left earned a third more than the ones who moved in.

Indiana didn't outbid anyone. AAA credit, 16 years straight. A $676M surplus. Fourth-lowest debt per person in the country. They just weren't a disaster.

Illinois could have collected $53M a year. It chose zero. Ignore all the bad management but make sure to stick it to those evil, pesky billionaires.

[James Woods @RealJamesWoods]

She survived Adolf Hitler, and then one treacherous weasel brought England to her knees.

It’s never an army, but a Trojan Horse that ends empires.

[Will Chamberlain @willchamberlain]

Spencer Pratt did an amazing job showing how the City of Los Angeles was brazenly stealing from taxpayers and not providing basic services

Is it any surprise that they would steal an election too?

[Jack O'Neill @Jack2LOneill]

It's Day 3 and still no Stargate.

Grow a spine @AmazonMGMStudio

[Spokker @Spokker]

@Izengabe_ @SteveKrak That is correct. Here's an example from 2018. Happens every time since then.

[SarahAnnRhoades @SarahAnnRhoades]

Ballot harvesting is why Dems always max-out their opportunities, and Republicans willingly leave seats at the table.

It's why Dems are crushing the GOP in WI. They squeeze every single voter out of Dane/MKE. All it takes is effort.

[Michael Ball @Michael_D_Ball]

Hey, @AmazonMGMStudio you've made the wrong choice by cancelling the new Stargate. Please reconsider.

[Vance Murphy @vancemurphy]

If you needed more proof that Laura Loomer is a deep state plant…

She is now saying anyone who opposes data centers are just foreigners, and billionaires bot farms trying to shut down AI dominance.

I don’t want data centers taking up one single inch of American land.

[Charles Henry @chuckn0804]

@SonRanto @Northsiders1985 @ChiRuxinBGO Says the tool who votes for billionaires for governor and massive AI data centers....riiiight.

[Charles Henry @chuckn0804]

@SonRanto @SanchoPanzy Not really, instead now you're the one who'll "get fucked". Enjoy higher taxes you economically illiterate tool. With the team leaving the state, how do you think the state will make up all the lost tax revenue the Bears already paid?

[Gavin McInnes @Gavin_McInnes]

The same people who are offended by the word “retard” are happy to wipe “special needs people” off the face of the earth.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

Remember:

The very purpose of mail-in ballots, no-ID laws, ballot harvesting and ballot drop boxes is to make it virtually impossible to prove widespread fraud while widespread fraud nevertheless routinely occurs.

[ThePatrioticBlonde™🇺🇸 @ImBreckWorsham]

Trump said yesterday that "affordability" is a "made up word" and that if you want cheaper housing, utilities and gas you're a "dumbocrat."

Thoughts?

[Steak 'n Shake @SteaknShake]

On our MAHA journey, we have introduced the following:

100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef ✅

100% beef tallow fries ✅

100% beef tallow tots ✅

Grade A Wisconsin butter ✅

A2 whole milk ✅

Cane-sugar Coca-Cola ✅

Elimination of all microwaves ✅

And we are working on changing our buns!

We are committed to becoming seed-oil free, because we are committed to making fast food the best it can be.

[PoIiMath @politicalmath]

This is really pulling the mask off. The previous narrative was "late ballots always lean toward Democrats, it's just demographics"

But now we are seeing that late ballots always lean toward the specific Democrat who needs more ballots.

That is not possible.

[Charles Henry @chuckn0804]

@chuckie_css @RobMKendall Completely false. The request was for tax certainty so they don't pay 25x the taxes other stadiums do and infrastructure improvements. They're putting up 2 billion to build the stadium and asking for 800 million in infrastructure only. Learn to read more then politicians' press.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

While I’m no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders’ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right.

The CEOs of the leading AI labs have told us repeatedly that they will cause massive job loss. This is not a story that I believe, nor does the data bear it out, but this is what they have told us. Similarly, they have hyped the risks of AI without putting an equal or greater emphasis on the benefits or readily available mitigations.

Conservatives have another fear. The employees of the leading labs claim to be philanthropic, but what we’ve seen is massive enrichment of NGOs advancing an agenda at odds with traditional values, fueling a revolution against our cities and communities. Soros-maxxing is not charity in our book.

Anthropic and OpenAI have established themselves as Public Benefit Corporations. What could be more in the public benefit than using half the wealth generated by these companies (which trained for free on the collective knowledge of humanity) to pay down the national debt? There is no ideological bias in that philanthropy.

Dario and Sam have begun to walk back their claims of massive job loss, but the damage to public trust is done, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. I could almost support the Sanders proposal as a stupidity tax.

There’s just one problem. Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we’re already sliding toward. Conservatives rightly fear a Central Bank Digital Currency. They ought to be even more concerned about Central Government AI — a system with even more totalistic power over information, decision-making, and human behavior.

We saw how social media was weaponized to censor conservatives (including President Trump) in the last Democrat administration. The definition of “trust & safety” expanded to mean protecting the public from supposed psychological harms, micro-aggressions, and disinformation (you know, like hearing conservative ideas or true facts about Covid).

That “safety” agenda as applied to AI will be vastly more powerful and Orwellian. AI won’t just moderate posts; it will curate reality — with the ability to rewrite history, enforce ideological conformity, influence policy at scale, mass surveil Americans, and condition the benefits of the many systems it controls on approved behavior.

America won’t win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S. — and that is the danger as the government becomes more deeply involved in AI development and assumes direct ownership and control.

Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed but ought to think more carefully about how regulations they are flirting with now (that are widely celebrated among those with a long history of lust for Big Government) will be used against them the next time a Democrat administration is in power.