Doug Gray

Forgiven child of God, husband to Rhonda, father of Caroline, Frances and Charlotte, proud American.

[Doug Gray @douglasgray23]

@DashDobrofsky The voters of Maine knew 95% of the known facts and overwhelmingly voted for him in the primary. Democracy at work. The voters have spoken.

[Larry Williams @LarryWilliamsTI]

Showed Dabo this photo yesterday, taken by Tricia Phillips (Terry Don's wife) at the celebration of Clemson's 2016 national championship.
An all-time photo that says so much about the AD who just had a hunch about this Dabo guy and stuck with him.

[Doug Gray @douglasgray23]

Way to go Dylan!! What a performance!

[Brown Baseball @BrownU_Baseball]

DOMINATION! 😤

Dylan Reid completely shuts down Yale's offense with a career performance 🔥 👏

[Doug Gray @douglasgray23]

Winston Churchill is turning over in his grave. Supporting this action against a terrorist regime is not a difficult decision.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

When the United States launched strikes on Iran, Britain's response was one of the most embarrassing performances by a Western government in living memory. John Healy refused six times to say whether Britain supported the action. Keir Starmer hedged, equivocated, and retreated into legal language while every comparable ally, Canada, Australia, Ukraine, stated their position clearly and without apology. It took Iranian missiles hitting a British base in Cyprus and a second day of bombardment before Starmer would even grant the US permission to use British overseas bases. That is not caution. That is paralysis.

The official explanation is international law. Lord Hermer's legal opinion concluded the strikes had no clear basis in law. That explanation does not hold. The same legal framework did not stop Canada or Australia. It did not stop successive British governments acting alongside the United States in circumstances where legality was equally contested. And it does not explain why Starmer refused to even characterise the Iranian threat, despite sitting on classified intelligence his own security services describe as a tier-one national security concern.

The real explanation is not legal. It is political. And it has been building for over twenty-five years.

Britain is no longer a country whose government can make foreign policy decisions in isolation from domestic demography. In city after city, London, Birmingham, Manchester, Bradford, Leicester, there are large and concentrated populations whose political loyalties, when it comes to conflicts in the Middle East, do not align with the British national interest. Elections have been won and lost on bloc votes organised around overseas conflicts. MPs sit in Parliament who owe their seats to communities for whom the Iran question is not abstract foreign policy but a matter of immediate and passionate concern. Starmer knows this. The calculation is not difficult to reverse-engineer.

When Iranian clerics declared jihad following Khamenei's death and protests spread from Pakistan to Iraq, the question for any British Prime Minister was not only what happens in the Gulf. It was what happens in Tower Hamlets, in Sparkbrook, in Burnley. The threat of domestic unrest and political blowback within his own electoral coalition shaped the response the public saw. The legal opinion was the excuse. The demographic arithmetic was the reason.

This did not happen by accident. It is the consequence of a border policy pursued by governments from Blair to Starmer that prioritised electoral calculation over national cohesion. Mass immigration without integration, without enforceable conditions, without honest public debate, has produced something no one in government will say plainly: a country that has lost the political freedom to act decisively when its interests require it. MI5 has confirmed twenty Iran-backed plots on British soil in two years. The parliamentary intelligence committee is expected to classify Iran as a threat on par with Russia and China. And yet the government cannot proscribe the IRGC, cannot state clearly whose side it is on, and cannot grant an ally access to a military base without waiting for missiles to land first.

In 2006, Muammar Gaddafi predicted that Europe's fifty million Muslims would deliver Islam victory on the continent within a few decades, without swords, without conquest. He framed it as a prophecy. It reads now more like an operational assessment. Britain has not been conquered. It has been rendered impotent, by its own political choices, now visible in the body language of a Prime Minister who cannot say the obvious thing because too many of his voters do not want to hear it.

That is the real answer to why Britain hesitated. Not Hermer. Not international law. Not principle. A governing party held hostage to the consequences of a demographic transformation it helped engineer and now dare not upset.

[Duke Energy South Carolina @DukeEnergySC]

Winter Storm #Fern continues to create dangerous conditions across the Carolinas:

•Do expect outages to climb. @DukeEnergy is ready to respond when safe with more than 18,000 restoration workers across the Carolinas. If you are experiencing an outage, please report it through the mobile app, by texting OUT to 57801 or by calling 800.POWERON (800.769.3766).
•Continue to be prepared – if you do have power, take advantage of it and charge your phone.
•Expect extremely cold temperatures today and through Tuesday morning.
•Please stay off the roads and let first responders, including utility workers, do their jobs safely.
cold temperatures today and through Tuesday morning.

[Doug Gray @douglasgray23]

@Hot_Pepper76 Marshall Tucker with lead singer Doug Gray…

[Doug Gray @douglasgray23]

Cry me a River.

[SEC Numbers Guy @secnumbersguy]

One thing is clear from these playoffs:

These other conferences MUST change their scheduling requirements to avoid the unfair advantage CUPCAKE schedules give other conferences.

The GRIND of an SEC schedule creates an unfair advantage.

[AP @Average_NY_Guy]

Who Will Build NYC if Builders Are the Enemy?

As a New Yorker Jew, I'm surrounded by people who have been in real estate their entire lives. I am not trying to feed a stereotype, but that's my reality. They aren't activists or online commentators. They are people who bought their first buildings with all their savings, carried debt through rate hikes, fixed things themselves when there was no money to hire, and stayed in New York through high crime, recessions, 2008, COVID, rising taxes, insurance increases, and an ever-expanding book of laws and codes. None of them were promised fairness before they started, and none of them were protected from risk. They succeeded very slowly, and painfully, but with responsibly.

That experience is exactly what is missing from the worldview of Zohran Mamdani, and it shows in every part of his housing agenda. Mamdani has never built anything. He never signed a personal guarantee, never met payroll, never carried a mortgage through a rough month, never had to choose between fixing a boiler now or hoping it survives another winter because there is no cash. He has only operated in a political world where consequences are abstract and other people absorb the risk. When you have never operated in the real economy, it becomes easy to believe that shortcuts are solutions.

It is also why his message resonates with a certain type of voter. The people demanding “housing reforms” are not bad people. They are frustrated renters who feel like the system is rigged against them. I understand the frustration. But frustration doesn't change math. Housing is hard. Ownership is a very slow process. Building anything meaningful in this city takes years of stress, and debt. The people calling for "landlord policies" often want the outcome without the grind, the stability without the risk, and the reward without the years of sweating that every responsible adult who succeeded here had to endure. But it does not work like that.

NYC is in housing crisis. Citywide vacancy sits around 1.4 percent, a level economists consider an emergency. Median rents keep rising anyway, with Manhattan near $4,800 and Brooklyn around $3,800, even under an already thick layer of regulation. The reason is obvious. Supply has not kept up. In a good year, New York adds roughly 30,000 units. The city needs hundreds of thousands more over the next decade just to stabilize prices. At the same time, construction costs here are among the highest in the country, financing is extremely difficult, and insurance is wildly expensive

Mamdani’s proposals take that fragile situation and make it worse. When you cap upside while leaving downside unlimited, rational people stop participating. Developers do not argue on X. Lenders do not protest. They simply reallocate. Projects stop coming up. Renovations are postponed. New construction dies before a shovel hits the ground. The people I know in real estate are not angry. They are disengaging. Some are buying elsewhere. Some are sitting on cash. Some are done entirely. And when that happens, tenants do not win. Buildings deteriorate, supply tightens further, and rents rise anyway.

What Mamdani offers is emotional satisfaction, not solutions. He tells voters that prices are high because someone else is greedy, not because the city has spent decades making housing harder and almost impossible to build. He frames landlords as villains instead of participants in an ecosystem that only works when incentives align. That framing feels good, but it does not produce housing. It produces resentment, fear, and withdrawal.

Everyone I know who made it in this city did it the same way. Slowly, without shortcuts. Policies written by people who never did that do not create fairness or affordability. They create shortages. NYC doesn't have a landlord problem. It has a confidence problem. And a city that teaches people to hate the builders while demanding more building is a city sabotaging its own future.

[Doug Gray @douglasgray23]

@GrahamNeff Merry Christmas Graham!!

[Doug Gray @douglasgray23]

Thank you Charles Schulz.

[👉M-Û-R-Č-H👈 @TheEXECUTlONER_]

It’s no accident that as Linus recites scripture & says, “Fear not…”, he drops his security blanket. He always had his blanket. Powerful.

Charles Schwartz knew then. “If we don’t do it, who will?”

We are still faced with that same question every day, even more so now than ever.

There was nothing like a quiet evening with the family and sitting down to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas. There still isn’t. ❤️

[Doug Gray @douglasgray23]

So much wisdom.

[Charlie Kirk @charliekirk11]

When things are moving very fast and people are losing their minds, it’s important to stay grounded. Turn off your phone, read scripture, spend time with friends, and remember internet fury is not real life. It’s going to be ok.

[Doug Gray @douglasgray23]

Speaking truth is not hate. Praying for Charlie Kirk and his family.

[Doug Gray @douglasgray23]

Congrats to Kris! Well deserved!!

[Clemson Athletics @ClemsonTigers]

✅ 1996 National Player-of-the-Year
✅ 1996 ACC Athlete-of-the-Year
✅ First overall selection in the 1996 MLB draft
🔜 Hall of Fame

Kris Benson, one of the greatest players in @ClemsonBaseball history, is heading to the National College Baseball Hall of Fame!

[Doug Gray @douglasgray23]

@dominiclisti So much admiration and appreciation for how you competed on every single pitch and play. You will do great in life with your attitude and work ethic. You’re always welcome in Tigertown.

[Doug Gray @douglasgray23]

@TerasGhost Please check The Giving Pledge that many of the world’s billionaires have signed. Much of their wealth will be donated to philanthropic causes.

[Our Clemson @OurClemson]

Get into the holiday spirit with two upcoming events at Hanover House, an 18-century French Huguenot home located in the South Carolina Botanical Garden. The events are free and open to the public. https://t.co/K1ZucNkwz9

[Doug Gray @douglasgray23]

Congrats to @ClemsonUniv and @CBradleyThomps1 on the transformational gift from Dave and Lynette Snow for the study of Capitalism.

[C. Bradley Thompson @CBradleyThomps1]

Just did a live interview on "The Big Money Show"
@FoxBusiness on David & Lynette Snow's $25 million gift to the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. Let's change the world! @BrianBrenberg, @JackieDeAngelis, @RiggsReport

https://t.co/gYgtV00a4J

[Doug Gray @douglasgray23]

Thanks Dave and Lynette!!

[Clemson University @ClemsonUniv]

With a transformational gift of $25 million, Dave and Lynette Snow have positioned the newly named Snow Institute for the Study of Capitalism to become the model program in America focused on the moral principles of capitalism.

[Doug Gray @douglasgray23]

@Sadie_NC This is old news and has been de-bunked. So much misinformation being spread on “both sides”.

[Doug Gray @douglasgray23]

@MurphAdams So sad for your loss of Murphy. Love the flowers. We lost our sweet Ellie on 8/23/24. I will miss Murphy’s tweets.