The Trump family’s business, World Liberty Financial, is corruption at a scale we’ve never seen.
World Liberty is currently being sued by Justin Sun, a major crypto founder, for:
1.Seizing his $75 million $WLFI investment.
2.Secretly adding controls allowing it to unilaterally freeze tokens, block governance rights, and burn holders’ tokens.
Ironic, no?
The leader of the free world is literally holding people’s money hostage.
A supposed “champion of decentralization” gave himself the authority to seize private property.
But wait. There’s more.
World Liberty borrowed $75 million using its own token as collateral. The exact type of circular borrowing and leverage that took down FTX. Another fraudulent crypto business.
This wouldn’t be a problem with government oversight. Instead, World Liberty just received preliminary conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to become a national trust bank.
By the time this house of cards collapses, the Trump family will have made hundreds of millions of dollars, sold its tokens, and left the American people holding the bag.
Oh, and let’s not forget. An Abu Dhabi-linked entity acquired a 49% stake in World Liberty. A separate UAE-based fund later bought $100 million of the $WLFI token.
We are now conveniently engaged in a never-ending war in the Middle East.
The crypto industry deserves better.
"There are no Amish with autism"
There are
"Vaccines aren't tested against placebo"
They are
"MMR has never been studied as a possible cause of autism"
It has. It's not the cause.
I apparently need to say this stuff over and over and over and over again.
And again.
George Washington rejected the idea of a massive presidential palace. The White House was deliberately scaled back because the president of the United States should not live like a king.
234 years later, Trump is posting Versailles fan fiction starring himself.
BREAKING NEWS: Dallas Cowboys practice was delayed two hours today after a player found an unknown white powdery substance on the field. Jerry Jones immediately suspended practice and called the police. After analysis, experts confirmed it was the goal line. Practice resumed once officials decided the Cowboys were unlikely to see it again this season.
When the banks needed help, they called it “stabilizing the economy.”
When airlines needed help, they called it “protecting jobs.”
When corporations got tax breaks, they called it “pro-growth.”
When working people need health care? “SOCIALISM.”
I watched Trump’s speech at the Correspondents’ Dinner last night.
It’s hard to articulate how sad it made me.
Sad and embarrassed and exhausted.
Here is the thing about a man who is a joke. He can’t tell one.
People think humor is a talent. It isn’t. It’s a capacity. To make someone laugh you have to be able to laugh at yourself, and to laugh at yourself you have to step outside of yourself and see what everyone else sees. For one second you have to be just another person in the room.
Most people can do this by the time they are nine years old.
He has never once managed it. Not in fifty years of cameras. Not for a second.
That is not a quirk. It is a symptom. The muscle that lets you tell a joke is the same one that lets you feel what another person feels. A man who cannot survive being laughed at cannot imagine being anyone but himself. He will only ever be generous when it is photographed. He will only ever be kind when it is filmed.
There is a name for it.
So he stood up there and did what he always does. He hit down. He made jokes about people’s weight. He made jokes about their intelligence. He made jokes about how women look. He read out the names of people he doesn’t like, and mocked them. Always mocking. And when no one laughed he blamed his speech writers.
The cruelty dressed as humor has worn so thin.
And for the 30% of you still in the cult who will inevitably call me a crackhead and blame it all on my Dad, all I can say is please, for the love of God, open your eyes. Wake the fuck up. Have some dignity. Have some pride.
Joe Biden wasn’t standing at that podium last night. Donald Trump was.
And at the end of it he put on a red hat that said Trump 2028 and told the room he was running again. No one laughed because everyone knows he has no intention of leaving.
Just another joke at our expense.
Jared Kushner holds no government position.
Yet he is our Middle East Envoy.
The Saudis have paid him $100M and invested $2B in his firm.
He pushed for Saudi nuclear enrichment over the objection of national security officials.
Today his father-in-law made it happen.
But what about my paintings…
When I heard about Senator Graham’s death last night, the first thing I thought about was not all the things he said and did in service of Donald Trump. I thought of the time before Donald Trump when he was a brother to Senator John McCain.
A time when senators from different parties could fight about politics and still be friends. A time when a conservative Republican from South Carolina could say of my father: “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem. He’s the nicest person I’ve ever met in politics. As good a man as God ever created.”
That is the Senator Graham I will remember today. Not because I have forgotten what came after. Because in that memory there is hope. Hope for a country where brothers can fight like hell over policy and still share a meal, and a laugh, and the loss of the people they love.
I will choose to remember the time before Trump. Because I believe in an America after Trump.
I see your profile picture. That’s Johnny Cash. My hero too. Arrested seven times. Smuggled 668 amphetamines across the Mexican border in 1965. Took every drug there was and drank like I did. Cheated on his first wife. Slept with more woman than I ever did. Hit bottom in a cave in Tennessee in 1968 trying to crawl off and die. And then he got up. He got clean. He spent the rest of his life singing for prisoners and addicts and the people the country threw away because he knew he was one of them.
That was the whole point of the Man in Black. He wore it for the poor and the beaten down. He wore it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime. He wore it for the ones who never heard a word of Jesus. He wore it for the addicted and the dying. He wore it as a standing witness that no one is past saving.
You picked his picture. You did not pick his message. Try listening to the words.
I'm not running for office. But if I were, these are some of the lessons I'd take away from what happened in NY yesterday.
1. Authenticity is measurable. Voters can smell a focus group from a mile away.
2. Endorsements from the current Democratic leadership now read like warnings. The establishment wing of the party is no longer a sword. It's a question mark.
3. Conviction beats caution. The candidates who said hard things about rent, about who pays for what, about Gaza, they won. The triangulators lost.
4. Cost of living is everything. Everything else is wallpaper.
5. The middle is not a strategy. It's an empty room. Voters reached past the establishment to grab someone who actually believes something.
6. Don't fear the base. Court it. The Democrats who ran from their own voters lost. The ones who ran toward them won.
7. If you want to lead a party you have to be willing to fight inside it. Mamdani didn't ask permission. He took the field.
The lesson under the lessons: the country is tired of being managed. People want to be led.
Imagine calling Renee Good and Alex Pretti “domestic terrorists” and calling immigrants “animals” then turning around and telling people they need to “tone down their rhetoric.”
Palantir vient de publier son manifeste. Lisez-le.
Pas pour ce qu'il dit sur la tech. Pour ce qu'il dit sur le politique. Sur l'idéologie de Karp et Thiel. Sur la guerre. Sur vous.
Quand une entreprise privée se donne pour mission de définir qui doit être surveillé, ciblé, prédit, neutralisé, et qu'elle publie simultanément un texte expliquant pourquoi contester cela serait de la faiblesse civilisationnelle, on n'est plus dans la stratégie d'entreprise. On est dans la privatisation du souverain. Le droit de décider de l'ennemi, qui fut toujours le geste politique fondateur des États, est en train d'être racheté par une entreprise cotée au Nasdaq.
Ce manifeste repose sur un seul tour de passe-passe, répété sous vingt formes différentes : rendre l'inévitable ce qui est en réalité un choix. Les armes à IA ? Elles seront construites de toute façon, alors autant que ce soit nous.
La surveillance algorithmique ? La réalité géopolitique l'exige.
Le réarmement de l'Occident, la hiérarchie des cultures, la disqualification du pluralisme comme naïveté dangereuse ? Simple lucidité face au monde tel qu'il est.
C'est le geste idéologique par excellence : ne pas interdire la question, mais la rendre indécente.
Ce que Palantir appelle réalisme est en fait une décision philosophique radicale : le conflit est la vérité permanente du monde, la délibération démocratique est une fragilité que l'adversaire exploitera, et une élite technologique privée est mieux placée qu'un peuple pour tirer les conséquences de cette vérité.
C'est du schmittisme en hoodie. C'est littéralement la structure de leur pensée.
Le danger n'est pas qu'ils soient fous. Le danger est qu'ils soient riches, cohérents, et déjà à l'intérieur des États. Palantir ne frappe pas à la porte des gouvernements pour vendre un outil. Elle arrive avec une cosmologie complète : voici comment fonctionne le monde, voici vos ennemis, voici pourquoi vous ne pouvez pas vous permettre de débattre, et voici notre contrat.
Palantir est l'ennemie des peuples et de la démocratie. Ce qu'ils construisent, c'est un pouvoir technocratique que personne n'a élu et que personne ne pourra destituer.
Fucking outrageous. And highly illegal.
"Trump has grifted his entire life. Now he’s just taking it.
The State Department transferred $1.25 billion in foreign aid to Trump’s Board of Peace, pulling $1 billion from international disaster assistance, $200 million from peacekeeping operations, and $50 million from international organizations.
Money that Congress authorized for hurricanes and refugees, moved without a congressional vote, into a fund that Trump created by executive order and controls personally. When reporters asked the State Department about it, a spokesperson said they had nothing to announce at this time.
The Board of Peace has one defining characteristic. Trump controls it forever. He named himself chairman for life. No audits. No transparency requirements. No conflict of interest rules.
Countries pay $1 billion into a fund he runs to get a seat at the table. It has transferred nothing to Gaza, disclosed nothing about its spending, and received $1.25 billion of your disaster relief money without a word of explanation.
When he leaves the White House he keeps the fund. That is not a loophole. That is the design."
He’s Not Grifting Anymore. He’s Just Taking It. https://t.co/eYb5g4g9bR
Hassett: "If the war were to be extended, it wouldn't really disrupt the US economy very much at all. It would hurt consumers, and we'd have to think about what we'd have to do about that, but that's really the last of our concerns right now."
We are at war with Iran. Russia is aiding Iran, as usual. Russia is helping Iran target our troops. Ukraine is helping us, in combating Iranian drones. And Trump, as usual, is dumping on Zelensky and boosting Putin. I ask my friends on the right: How can you stand it?