Jack Richards

[Paul Vallas @PaulVallas]

The Tale of Two Billionaires

Last week, Illinois’ most famous out-migrant and most generous philanthropist, Ken Griffin, pledged $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University, with $2 billion alone going toward a Miami campus—the largest gift to a university in history.

Griffin has already donated $400 million to organizations in his new home state of Florida.

Gov. JB Pritzker and other Democrats publicly mocked Griffin and celebrated when he and more than 1,000 of his well-paid employees left Illinois, taking with him the $200 million in annual state income taxes he pays, not counting those paid by his well-compensated employees.

Griffin’s sin? Trying to help keep Illinois a two-party state by countering Pritzker’s massive political spending. The absence of checks and balances has allowed Pritzker to raise taxes and fees 63 times, taking another $87 billion out of the pockets of Illinois residents and businesses.

Billionaire Pritzker, by the way, apparently paid only $869,000 in taxes in 2024, while the family trust paid $4.5 million.

Griffin took his charity with him, too, after providing a record $650 million to Chicago-area institutions, including awarding $130 million after he had already made his decision to leave—dwarfing Pritzker’s giving.

Meanwhile, the Pritzker family has generously benefited from a charitable government through various commercial property tax reductions, publicly backed venue funding, and legacy tax structures.

Unlike Griffin, who spends many times more on charity than on politics, Pritzker’s preferred charity is himself, having spent $439 million to be elected governor, millions more on Democratic candidates in Illinois and nationwide, and $30 million in the last election to help secure a Republican nominee who would be easier for him to beat.

[Illinois Policy @illinoispolicy]

Despite @GovPritzker's self-congratulatory claims of financial recovery, Moody's officially confirmed that Illinois still has the worst credit rating in the nation.

Why is this still happening?

Because nearly 15% of state revenue is diverted toward pension debt.

And because taxes keep going up to cover the shortfall, Illinoisans keep moving out of state. Over 168,000 people have fled Illinois since 2018 alone.

State lawmakers keep raising taxes, but the state's fiscal health is not getting any better. In fact, it is clearly worsening.

This is what a doom loop looks like.

[Justin Greer @uscommsnerd]

@LeadingReport Too bad.

You can download the camera list used on the map at https://t.co/u1ynuqzF7v

[Jack Richards @lejack27]

@MikeYou65536049 @ACumbow lol. Good thing they didn’t play each other this year….at Purdue….

[Hoop Herald @TheHoopHerald]

This is wild 😳

[Jack Richards @lejack27]

@s3c_bshaw @BarstoolMSU Pat Fitzgerald.

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

(Warning: long rant)

My liberal friends are completely oblivious about how radicalizing the last week has been for tens of millions of normal Americans. Zero clue.

I’m not talking about people who are “online”; I mean regular, everyday Americans. “Normies.” People who scroll through Facebook posts and Instagram reels from the Dutch Bros drive thru line. Political moderates who have water cooler chats about Mahomes touchdowns and Bon Jovi concerts, not Twitter threads or Rachel Maddow monologues.

Millions of them. Tens of millions. They’re logging on, they’re engaging, and they’re furious.

And I’ll be candid: They blame you guys. They blame the left.

Regardless of whether you believe it to be justified, they think you’re the bad guys here. And they are reacting accordingly.

I can already hear some of you racing toward the comments to start screeching in moral indignation, so I’m going to be blunt: Shut up and listen to what I’m telling you. Your movement will lose any semblance of relevance if you don’t develop some small measure of self-awareness, and—absent someone force-feeding you bitter medicine—you guys collectively lack the humility to do this on your own.

Here are the facts:

Fact 1. Tens of millions of Americans started the week seeing a 23-year-old blonde woman—a young woman in whom virtually every parent watching pictured their own daughter—stabbed in the neck by a career criminal. These people then found out the murderer had been released from jail 14 times over.

Fact 2. Two days later, tens of millions of Americans watched a video of Charlie Kirk get murdered speaking to college students. Millions of these people knew who Charlie was; millions of them didn’t. Upon seeing the video, however, these normal Americans from across the land and across the political spectrum agreed that he was the victim of a terrible, fundamentally unjustifiable crime, and their hearts broke in sympathy for his family. Good people who had never even heard the name Charlie Kirk before wept.

Fact 3. Immediately after seeing the footage of a peaceful young man get shot in the neck, these same people logged onto Facebook and Instagram (remember, we are talking about regular Americans, not perpetually online Twitter or Bluesky users) and saw some of their local nurses, school teachers, college administrators, and retail workers celebrating this horrific crime. Not just defending it, but cheering it.

These are all facts. You may not like the implications of these facts, and we can certainly debate the underlying causes thereof, but, indisputably, they are nevertheless factual statements.

Here’s what it means for you, the Democrats reading this:

These normal, middle-of-the-road, non-political citizens just become politically active. They realized that politics cares about them, even if they don’t particularly care about politics. After watching Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk both bleed out from the neck, they think their lives and the physical safety of their families—the bedrock of human society, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—depend on political activation, whether they desire it or not.

These people are now sprinting—not jogging, not walking, but racing—to the right. Because they blame you guys for everything that just happened.

When they see footage of Decarlos Brown stabbing a Ukrainian refugee to death, they don’t see just one demon-possessed man. They picture every university administrator, HR bureaucrat, and DEI apparatchik that ever lectured them about systemic racism, the “carceral state,” or the need to release violent crime suspects without bail in the name of social justice.

They then think back to conversations they’ve had with their cop friends—their buddy from high school who quit the force after getting tired of being called a racist, their friend at the local YMCA who vents about having to release career criminals because Soros-funded prosecutors aren’t willing to file charges—and they realize everything the left has told them over the last five years has been utter bullshit.

And they blame you. Because, even if you count yourself as a moderate Democrat, your party supported the district attorneys, city council members, and mayors that let fictitious concerns about mental health and racial justice supersede very real concerns for their family’s safety.

When these Americans see blood erupt from the side of Charlie Kirk’s neck, they don’t see just a martyred political activist. They think of every extreme leftist they’ve ever met who (1) calls anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton a fascist and (2) constantly jokes—“jokes”—about punching Nazis and “bashing the fash.”

They realize that there really do exist people who wish to see them dead for their moderately conservative political beliefs, their Christian faith, and even the color of their skin. They ask themselves if the violence visited upon Charlie might one day show up on their own doorstep.

And they blame you. Because, even if you’re just a center-of-the-road liberal, you lacked the courage to police your own ranks. You let modern-day Maoist red guards run loose across every facet of society, and what started with social-media struggle sessions has now turned to 30-06 bullet holes.

When these Americans log onto social media and see their neighbors justifying, celebrating, glorifying murder, they realize that some who walk among them are soulless ghouls at best, literally demon-possessed at worst. These people—whether they faithfully attend church every Sunday or only attend with relatives once a year, on Christmas Eve—start talking about things like spiritual warfare. They implicitly understand that no normal human casually celebrates the mortal demise of a peaceful person.

And they blame you. Because, even if you condemned Charlie Kirk’s murder, they probably haven’t seen you condemn those in your own movement who cheered it on. They view you as complicit in allowing heartless fellow travelers to celebrate death, and it repulses them.

For all of these situations, what has your response been? Nothing but bullshit.

In response to Iryna Zarutska bleeding out on the floor of a train, you post bullshit statistics about reductions in reported crime, when everyone who’s ever been to a major urban center in the last decade knows that actual crime has skyrocketed, only for victims not to waste their time reporting it to cops that don’t have the manpower to respond and prosecutors that seek to downgrade as many felonies as possible to misdemeanor citations.

In response to a 31-year-old man taking a bullet to the neck in front of his family, you post nothing but bullshit whataboutism.

> “What about January 6th?” (Honest answer: After you let Liz Cheney spend two years operating a star chamber in the House, combined with countless other failed attempts at “lawfare” against Trump, no one cares anymore.)

> “What about Mike Lee making a dumb joke on Twitter about some guy in a mask in Minnesota?” (No one outside of Utah, DC, or Twitter knows who Mike Lee even is.)

> “What about Paul Pelosi?” (That’s not comparable to Charlie Kirk getting shot, and we all know it. And, again, Paul who?)

> “What about regulations on assault rifles?” (That’s not going to get you very far when one of these killers used a knife and the other one used a common hunting rifle.)

In response to teachers, healthcare workers, and thousands of other liberals cheering on Charlie’s murder, it’s nothing but more bullshit and misdirection.

> “It’s not THAT many people celebrating!” (Yes, it is. Everyone has seen it on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.)

> “I thought you guys didn’t support cancel culture.” (We don’t cancel people over their opinions; we’re more than happy to see people lose their jobs—especially their taxpayer-funded jobs—for actively cheering on murder, though. If you can’t see the difference, that’s your own shortcoming.)

All bullshit. Not even smart bullshit, but stale, mid-grade, low-IQ bullshit. Ordinary Americans see right through it, and they don’t like how it smells.

You probably don’t like hearing this. But you need to hear it.

Because I’m right, and, as you reflect on this, you know I’m right. The ranks of my political movement gained millions of righteously angry new members this week. We have a mandate to ensure these crimes never happen again, and that’s exactly what we are now going to do.

If you want to keep a seat at the table as we do so, you’d better clean house and start policing your own.

[Being Libertarian @beinlibertarian]

Dave Smith giving people a little wake up call and throwing it to the propaganda press.

Gotta love it.

Do you think America is in a late stage Empire?

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr @RobertKennedyJr]

The Pentagon just failed their sixth audit. They use our tax dollars with no remorse or oversight. That stops with me. #Kennedy

[Elizabeth Goitein @LizaGoitein]

RED ALERT: Buried in the House intelligence committee’s Section 702 “reform” bill, which is schedule for a floor vote as soon as tomorrow, is the biggest expansion of surveillance inside the United States since the Patriot Act. 1/11

[Ian Miles @ianmiles]

That producer in her ear must be going nuts. Vivek decimated her, and she can't even pull out the racism card against him.

[Len Whalen @LenWhalenX]

@RealJamesWoods Share his face all across social media.

[Sal the Agorist @SallyMayweather]

Take all the time you need with this one friends..

[Stock Talk @stocktalkweekly]

🚨IMPORTANT: Today was the last CPI print that will be calculated by the current methodology. February's CPI print will be the first report based on a *new methodology*

CPI was formerly based on two years of consumption data. Now, CPI will be based on a single year of data.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

Those trying to reduce the NY Post stories to "pictures of Hunter Biden's genitals" or about his "drug use" are brazen liars.

The censored stories were about *Joe Biden's* sketchy business activities in Ukraine and China. Here were the headlines of the 2 censored articles:👇

[Isabella Maria DeLuca @IsabellaMDeLuca]

This is your reminder that Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty 327 days ago of child trafficking and not one predator that paid to be on an island with minors has had their name released, their home raided, or been arrested.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

Representative Austin Scott was the top political trader in 2021.

He sold FuelCell Energy, $FCEL, on 2021-01-14, after buying on 2020-10-30, for a 780%.

He sat on the Commodity Exchanges, Energy, and Credit subcommittee.

Wild.

[Cernovich @Cernovich]

The FDA is trying to make it so that people in Florida die of Covid. They’ll kill people to harm Republicans. Steel yourselves for the evil that is being unleashed.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

One of the few factions (perceived to be) on the left that actually threatens and frightens the US Govt and their corporate owners are the heroic animal rights activists who fight against the evils of factory farms. They're prosecuted as terrorists. This victory is great to see: