Dan Lauderback

Husband, Dad, former Accenture executive, cyclist, advisor

[Dan Lauderback @ddlaud]

@TheAlexJacob @RandPaul Alex, you are spot on!

Rand, a truck full of pregnant women can be driven through “…otherwise lawfully present in this country…” tighten it down and fix it!

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Atlas Shrugged made simple:

1. Society runs on a small number of highly capable producers – industrialists, inventors, engineers – whose work everyone depends on but takes for granted.

2. The system starts rewarding need over achievement: the more capable you are, the more you’re expected to sacrifice for those who aren’t.

3. Success gets treated like a debt – taxed, regulated, resented – until the most capable start asking why they bother trying at all.

4. One by one, led by a man named John Galt, they simply withdraw – walking away rather than keep propping up a system that punishes them for producing.

5. Without them, the whole structure collapses, revealing that the “automatic” prosperity everyone assumed was actually being generated by specific, irreplaceable people.

6. Atlas is the Titan from Greek myth, condemned to carry the sky on his shoulders forever – Rand’s stand-in for the producer class, holding up civilization while getting blamed for it.

7. “Shrugged” is the whole argument in one word: Atlas doesn’t fight, doesn’t protest – he just quietly sets the weight down. Nobody realized the sky was being held up by anyone in particular, until the day it isn’t.
You don’t want us? We just go…🤷🏻‍♂️

[Steve Stewart-Williams @SteveStuWill]

Not only have conservatives become vanishingly rare in academia, so have centrists. That’s how complete the left’s dominance is: Even moderates are now a fringe group in academia.

https://t.co/3TCZW5YzIF

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️The real signal is that a city that produces a meaningful fraction of global financial output just elected someone running explicitly on taking property from the people who produce it.

This is not a protest vote. This is the coalition stating its actual preferences. The preferences are incoherent with the city continuing to function as a financial center. One of those two things is going to give. The city is going to stop being a financial center, or the coalition is going to be politically defeated, or Mamdani is going to govern nothing like he campaigned. The third option is the most likely because it’s the standard pattern, but the first two are live.

The actual structural situation in New York: the top 1% of filers pay roughly half the city’s income tax. The top 10% pay around 75%. The math is that a small number of high earners subsidize services for everyone else, and the subsidy is what makes the city livable for the people who aren’t high earners. When those earners leave, the subsidy leaves with them, and the services they were funding get cut or the taxes on the remaining population rise. There is no version where you tax the rich into staying. They have options. The options are better now than they were five years ago and will be better in five years than they are now. Every marginal tax increase moves the departure math.

Mamdani’s voters believe the rich will pay more and stay. This is empirically false and has been for decades. The Laffer curve is a caricature but the underlying phenomenon is real at the state and city level because the substitution cost is low. You don’t need to emigrate. You need to move to Connecticut, Florida, Texas, or Tennessee. Millions of people have done this. The pattern is documented, measured, and predictable. Pretending otherwise is the policy equivalent of pretending gravity is optional.

The deeper thing Mamdani’s election reveals: a substantial fraction of urban voters now hold a worldview in which productive activity is theft, wealth is evidence of extraction, and redistribution is the primary function of politics. This worldview has specific intellectual lineage running from certain strains of Marxism through the academic left through social media radicalization. It’s not a serious economic framework. It’s a moral framework dressed as an economic one.

The moral intuition is that inequality is itself the injustice, regardless of how the inequality arose or what it produces. A serious economic framework would ask whether the inequality produces good outcomes for the median person, would note that high-productivity cities produce enormous surplus that funds services, and would balance extraction against the ecosystem that generates the wealth to be extracted. The Mamdani framework skips all of that and goes straight to: they have it, we want it, take it.

This framework, when operationalized, destroys the thing it feeds on. Every case study confirms this. No case study contradicts it. The cases where redistribution worked, Scandinavia in the twentieth century, post-war West Germany, Singapore, involved redistributing from productive economies that were allowed to stay productive. The redistribution was moderate, rule-bound, and applied to a capital base that couldn’t easily flee because international capital mobility was constrained. None of those conditions hold in New York in 2026. Capital mobility is near-frictionless for the high end. Rule-bound redistribution is not what Mamdani campaigned on. The ideological content is much closer to expropriation than to Nordic social democracy.

The broader United States pattern is that this dynamic is concentrated in the cities that already had it, and those cities are where the productive economy is also concentrated. The country has decoupled into two economic models. One model, roughly blue-state urban, runs on high-productivity services, high taxes, high housing costs, declining quality of services relative to what’s paid for them, and increasingly extractive politics.

The other model, roughly red-state urban and suburban, runs on lower productivity but faster growth, lower taxes, lower housing costs, and more functional services. The sorting between the two is accelerating.

People and capital are moving from the first to the second at historically significant rates.

The first model is not reforming because its political coalition is locked in by the voters who benefit from the extractive politics in the short term.

The second model is not free of problems but is currently winning the migration competition by large margins.

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

Just as I predicted yesterday…. MSM will falsely claim the Secretary of the Navy was fired because of Battleships.

And the NYTimes is actually worse than I thought. Let me explain….

The mainstream media will make this about the ships because the defense “experts” never want more hulls. They want money flowing into consulting fees, AI “solutions,” and think tank white papers. Steel produces nothing for the Beltway class. A flight deck you can launch F-35s off of does not generate PowerPoints.

But the NYTimes is running an even more sinister play.

Throughout the Biden administration, and later during DOGE’s audit work, I translated every major spending bill into a unit every American can actually visualize: one nuclear aircraft carrier.

Nuclear supercarrier cost: $15 billion.

Biden’s BEAD rural broadband program, which connected zero homes to the internet: $42.5 billion, or roughly three carriers.

Pete Buttigieg’s infrastructure package: $1.1 trillion, or seventy three carriers.

Total DOGE savings to date: $215 billion, or fourteen carriers.

Known Somali-linked fraud in Minnesota, per federal prosecutors: $18 billion, or one carrier plus an Arleigh Burke destroyer.

Why do I keep doing this?

Because for the past two decades the NYTimes has run the same story on loop: the military is the reason for America’s skyrocketing national debt.

That is a psyop. It conditions Americans to believe that steel and sailors, not social programs and grift, are what is bankrupting the country.

Human beings are not wired to understand $15 billion. The mind goes blank at that scale. But every American, left or right, understands the sheer weight and menace of a nuclear aircraft carrier. It is the most visible, most photogenic instrument of state power on earth.

So the NYTimes runs the obvious play.

Paint the carrier as expensive. Pile on delays and cost overruns. Quote an anonymous Pentagon source worrying about bloat. Then anchor the defense budget to “discretionary spending,” a small slice of the real pie, and express it as a percentage of that smaller number.

The Pentagon instantly looks like the whale in the room.

But Medicare alone, roughly $1 trillion in 2025, already eclipses the entire defense budget. Add Medicaid and ACA subsidies and federal health spending hits $1.8 trillion, more than double defense. None of those programs are labeled “discretionary,” so by NYTimes accounting, they “don’t count.”

This is a magic act. The NYTimes holds a shiny capital ship up in one hand to keep your eyes off the social programs bankrupting the country in the other.

Once you see the trick, you cannot unsee it. Every time the NYTimes runs a carrier or battleship exposé, ask one question: what is on the page they did not write?

Nine times out of ten, the answer is sitting just outside the “discretionary” column, quietly metastasizing, while a Ford class carrier gets blamed for the deficit.

America is not going broke building warships. Warships are one time expenses that last decades and are a tiny fraction of the total annual budget.

America is going broke pretending the ledgers that matter do not exist, while a national newspaper gets paid to keep the audience looking the other way.

That’s why they hate battleships. That’s why they tell you they are ridiculous and antiquated warships that are a waste of money. To make you think THIS is the reason why the nation is $39T in debt.

And the best part? Their psyop works on both sides of the aisle… on liberals who hate the military and conservatives who hate federal spending.

Battleships are not a waste of money. All the many fraudulent programs that cost more annually than a single carrier are.

[Dan Lauderback @ddlaud]

@HarmeetKDhillon @Sonos Awful product

[Dan Lauderback @ddlaud]

@EkoLovesYou 👍🏼🧠

[Dan Lauderback @ddlaud]

@AnnCoulter Ann !!!! NO !!!!! 😢

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

“The USA is finally saying enough. I am here, I can tell you what the vibe is, and that's it. Trump is doing what people want in this regard. They're over it.”

I live in the most liberal, most pro-Europe, state and even many of my friends who hate Trump are over it.👇

[Mary Margaret Olohan @MaryMargOlohan]

SCOOP: President Donald Trump plans to nominate @HarmeetKDhillon to be DOJ’s Associate Attorney General this week, @realDailyWire has learned. Source familiar also says Stanley Woodward, who previously held the position, resigned earlier on Saturday.

[Dan Lauderback @ddlaud]

@chamath @BillAckman @X Bill, I agree with your approach 💯.

“Ronda”, best of luck to you. Greed and dishonesty are losers; your gravy train has pulled into the station!

[Dan Lauderback @ddlaud]

@elonmusk @dalipolitial Hahaha

[Dan Lauderback @ddlaud]

@elonmusk @beffjezos @tszzl @peterdevietien

[Dan Lauderback @ddlaud]

@0hour1 👋🏼

[Dan Lauderback @ddlaud]

@HenryFrank02 Charge him in Criminal Fed Court for Willful Deprivation of Rights and Obstruction of Justice; he has no immunity in Criminal Court and his repeated bogus / grotesque rulings fit those crimes very well! @AGPamBondi @HarmeetKDhillon @PamBondi @AAGDhillon

[Dan Lauderback @ddlaud]

@MaryBowdenMD @Cernovich “At best, Ivermectin reduces COVID risk and illness with very high confidence…” I have first hand experience; it saved my life and several close friends too.

[Dan Lauderback @ddlaud]

@FaulknerKristen 😂

[Dan Lauderback @ddlaud]

@Cernovich Check check

[Dan Lauderback @ddlaud]

@RealJamesWoods On what basis can Vance step in? I don’t believe he can do so via some legal / constitutional rule. He would have to be elected as Speaker by the GOP.

[Dan Lauderback @ddlaud]

@BernieSanders Thank you Ellisons and thank you Bernie for the reminder!