Alex Collmer

Entrepreneur, husband, dad. Ultra-marathoner. Believer that truth exists. Founder & CEO, VidMob:

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

@JonHeyman 1) Dodgers
2) Dodgers
3) Dodgers
4) Dodgers
5) Dodgers
6) Dodgers
7) LA Dodgers
8) Dodgers
9) Dodgers

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

I’m all for highly progressive tax systems. That’s been a bedrock feature of keeping the American dream alive for 100+ years, and it’s true that the upper income brackets have paid (much) more in the past.

But attacking individuals by name is not the way.

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

Happy Tax Day, New York. We’re taxing the rich.

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

@YankeeSource The pressures of a 50/50 season loom large :)

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

@aripap

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

W is doing most of the work here. Incredibly impressive.

[Sam Block @theblockspot]

UConn in the Final Four:
2026… Both
2025… W
2024… Both
2023… M
2022… W
2021… W
2020… Covid
2019… W
2018… W
2017… W
2016… W
2015… W
2014… Both
2013… W
2012… W
2011… Both
2010… W
2009… Both
2008… W
Every year since 2008 is INSANE.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

@YankeeSource It’s fixed now. Thanks!

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

@YankeeSource Why is the game 4 recap behind a different paywall on the app than the other games? Is it right that I need a different subscription for this game?? Feels off.

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

Did this congressman actually put a Trump casino in his post on this?

[Congressman Randy Fine @RepFine]

Huge News! Today, I am proud to introduce the Greenland Annexation and Statehood Act, a bill that allows the President to find the means necessary to bring Greenland into the Union. 

Let me be clear, our adversaries are trying to establish a foothold in the Arctic, and we can’t let that happen.  

By acquiring Greenland, we would prevent our adversaries from controlling the Arctic Region and secure our northern flank from Russia and China.

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

Thank you ChatGPT. I’m sure this is accurate.

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

I read this book when it was written, and remember re-reading this exact passage multiple times. Sagan was a treasure, and his work on making science (and knowledge/expertise) both understandable and respectable was a gift to us all.

[Saganism @Saganismm]

Carl Sagan’s prediction about America, made 31 years ago.

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

“What do you say about a guy who plays an old, battered guitar that he treats like it's the last loyal dog in the universe?”

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

The world needs more poets. Thank you Bob Dylan for describing one of my favorite artists (Willie) in exactly the way he deserves to be described.

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

@scottbelsky Craftland is a great read on exactly this topic. https://t.co/31Ixel3WPF

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

👏 It hurts to read this. But it’s true. One day America will live up to its values again.

[Yasmina @yasminalombaert]

When Claude Malhuret speaks, you know you're not going to get the usual political spin. This is a man—a doctor, a former head of Doctors Without Borders, and a French politician—who has seen the world from the front lines and knows the difference between comforting lies and painful truths.

He is here to give us a necessary, perhaps even brutal, wake-up call about the most serious challenges facing Europe. He’s cutting through the noise to tell us exactly what we need to hear, not what we might want to hear.
Claude Malhuret lays out the unvarnished urgency of the current moment.

"Mr. Prime Minister, ladies and gentlemen ministers, I will not talk to you about strategy tonight. I will talk to you about urgency. And the urgency today can be summed up in one simple sentence: If Ukraine loses the war, Europe will find itself in direct confrontation with Russia and under the worst possible conditions.
The conclusion is clear: Ukraine must not lose this war.
'Worse than the executioner is his valet,' said Mirabeau. [ French politician and orator, one of the greatest figures in the National Assembly that governed France during the early phases of the French Revolution. ]
Those who are not yet convinced that Trump is putin’s valet should reflect on the latest events: an American peace plan drafted in Moscow. Witkoff advising the Russians how best to maneuver his boss, an obsession with sidelining Europeans from negotiations, a near-total halt to economic and military aid, a new national security strategy implacable against Europe and complacent toward Russia.

Today, at best, Europe is alone, at worst, it faces two enemies: Russia and Trumpism.

Tomorrow, in history books, we will no longer say 'Munich,' we will say 'Anchorage”.
We will no longer say 'Daladier' or 'Chamberlain,' we will say Trump, who is in the process of offering the Russians through betrayal what they are failing to conquer by arms—without forgetting, of course, to enrich his family and cronies in the process. In Europe, a president with such conflicts of interest would be immediately impeached.

The MAGA system is breaking all American values and forcing us to rethink all our strategic reflections, and worse still, to do so in uncertainty, at the mercy of daily changes in course based on the boss's moods. The only continuity in this senseless policy is to repudiate, humiliate, and vassalise all allies.

Churchill said that there is only one thing worse than fighting alongside allies, and that is fighting without them.

Trump and his real estate developers masquerading as diplomats will realise this the day they find out, at their expense, on a crisis ground, that no power in the world can do without allies.
Everyone has known this since the defeat of Athens against Sparta.

putin’s strategic objective is not Ukraine, it is the return to Yalta. He announced it in Munich in 2007, saying that NATO must return to its 1997 borders.
Listen to Karaganov today: 'The war will only end when we have defeated Europe.' putin’s goal is not to take territory, it is to take revenge on the West and its right, to return to a world ruled by force—a Concert of Great Powers: Moscow, Washington, Beijing.

Alas, this is also Trump's vision. For this, they must finish off NATO and the European Union. And the world of NATO and the EU, which seemed unshakeable, is revealing itself to be a colossus with feet of clay.

Europe is alone, and for three years, anaesthetised by three decades of tranquility, hampered by its divisions and the clumsiness of its procedures, weakened by its deindustrialisation, and terrorised by putin’s threats, it has barely managed to avoid the worst.

Thanks primarily to the heroism of the Ukrainians, it is time to regain control.

1/3

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

@Carsobi What if fouls in the last 2 mins meant 3 fouls shots instead of 2?

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

On this morning, it’s worth saying this for the millionth time. Our children have to live in terror at school entirely because our political leaders don’t care enough to do anything about it. There is no mystery about how to stop this. They just don’t care.

[Mia Tretta @mia_tretta]

I was shot at a school shooting at 15. Last night spent locked down at my university while learning of casualties & the many injured. This is not how I imagined life when I was little girl. I miss that carefree child I once was. Thinking of the many affected #BrownUniversity

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

@aripap @EricTilbury_RTB @joe_zappa @ericfranchi @joerogan Or start discussing if chemtrails could become an ad network.

[Alex Collmer @collmerica]

It feels like we've left Bedford Falls and entered Pottersville. I really hope the movie has another chapter in it.

[Daniel Roberts @readDanwrite]

"It’s the age of authenticity... Also, it’s done tastefully. No one is offended, right? It’s just funny. Young people like it."

A look at the strategic shitposting of Polymarket and Kalshi: https://t.co/Fkb8W1gS4x

[Caitlin Flanagan @CaitlinPacific]

“Only a fool thinks antisemitism is a threat just to Jews - it’s a very, very serious threat to everything we can decently call civilization”

Christopher Hitchens