Laura Toelle

[Flopping Aces @FloppingAces]

Remember when Trump's interest in Greenland was supposedly proof that he was a geopolitical idiot? The foreign policy establishment laughed its ass off at the idea of America strengthening its position in the Arctic.

Well, who's laughing now?

A reported new military-access arrangement involving Greenland and Denmark has been followed by Trump's announcement of preparations for major oil, gas, and mineral exploration.

The same Greenland these pompous assholes treated like the punchline of a late-night comedy routine.

An enormous Arctic landmass positioned near critical North Atlantic approaches, with potential energy wealth, mineral resources, and growing strategic importance as polar routes become more accessible.

And Washington's self-appointed foreign policy geniuses thought the appropriate response was to make fucking jokes.

Apparently, decades of prestigious credentials couldn't teach them to recognize strategic geography.

Now Trump is pursuing something they were too busy sneering to examine: the possibility of reinforcing American military access with commercial development that gives future governments powerful economic reasons to maintain those relationships.

Military access protects investments. Investments create jobs, infrastructure, and long-term financial interests. Those interests strengthen the strategic relationship.

That's how influence becomes harder to reverse.

And Greenland is only the northern piece.

In Alaska, Trump has announced proposed multidecade natural gas commitments involving Taiwan, alongside substantial investment plans involving South Korea. Farther south, Venezuela's energy resources present another opportunity to expand American commercial leverage.

The projects aren't all built. The deals still have to produce results. But the emerging strategy deserves considerably more attention than the establishment's endless fucking lectures about Trump's diplomatic manners.

From the Arctic to South America, he's pursuing opportunities to connect security, energy, infrastructure, and economic influence.

Meanwhile, the people who spent years treating American power like an embarrassing historical inconvenience are suddenly horrified that an American president wants to use it to advance American interests.

What an extraordinary collection of strategic geniuses.

They can identify every possible violation of diplomatic etiquette from three continents away, yet apparently struggle to recognize the significance of Arctic access and long-term energy infrastructure.

They laughed at Greenland because they thought Trump was looking at a giant frozen island.

He was looking at military positioning, natural resources, economic leverage, and the possibility of an American strategic foothold that could endure for generations.

The supposed experts were busy writing the punchlines.

Trump was trying to figure out who would control the fucking punch bowl.
(article below)

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

That’s how you write a headline.

[Ari Fleischer @AriFleischer]

Now do Abdul calling himself a physician

[Bear @the_jabronie]

I live just a few miles outside of Bend Oregon. My daughter lives there. I worked for the my towns school district for 35 years. My best friend is a Principal in Bend. I have many friends there.

I’m angry tonight, extremely angry. I’m angry that 4 families just had their lives torn apart. I’m angry that this liberal town is already showing sympathy towards the shooter and questioning why the hero who saved countless lives illegally had a firearm on school property. I’m angry that most of the rhetoric is about banning guns and not about figuring out why another messed up teenager decided to carry out one of the most evil acts possible, shooting innocent children.

Maybe my heart is in the wrong place. I’m deeply hurt for the victims families and praying for them. However, I’m raging over the fact that our leaders are already making political statements less than 4 hours after it happened.

Three families kissed their kids goodbye for the last time and a spouse kissed their loved one goodbye for the last time.

Someone knew this kid’s intentions and did nothing.

[MAGA Voice @MAGAVoice]

Hmmm… Very interesting 🤔

[Hammer🇺🇲 @HammertheNails]

The four biggest killers in human history are communism, socialism, islam, and abortion. Democrats support them all. Very telling.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

My dear American friends, I've shown you where the disease came from and who sells it. Now I want you to look at this email.

January 5, 2020, 2:44 in the morning. Peter Thiel writes to Mark Zuckerberg, Nick Clegg, Sheryl Sandberg and Marc Andreessen. It became public years later, in a lawsuit between the state of Tennessee and Meta. The subject line is one word: Millennials.

Thiel starts from a number: 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist.

Read that again. Seven out of ten young adults in the richest, freest, most innovative country in human history say they want the system that ruined every country that tried it.

And Thiel, one of the sharpest minds in Silicon Valley, says something important. Don't just dismiss them as stupid or brainwashed. Understand why. His answer: when you're crushed by student debt and housing is unaffordable, you have no capital and no way to build any. And if you have no stake in capitalism, you turn against it.

He's right. But follow the thread one step further, because that's where it gets interesting.

Who made college unaffordable? Washington flooded universities with easy federal loans, and universities raised their prices year after year, because they could. The same universities that then taught those students, for four years, that capitalism is the problem.

Who made housing unaffordable? Zoning rules, permits, environmental reviews, endless regulation that makes it nearly illegal to build. Remember Piketty's famous rise of capital? It was mostly housing. Scarcity created by the state.

So here's the full picture. The state creates the scarcity. The universities teach that capitalism caused it. The politicians sell socialism as the cure. The arsonist is selling fire insurance.

That's why 70% is not a natural opinion. No generation wakes up one morning wanting central planning. It takes decades of teaching, a captured culture, and an economy rigged to give young people no stake in it. In a healthy country, that number would trigger a serious public investigation into what American universities have been teaching for fifty years. This is not a debate. It's the result of a long, patient operation, exactly the war of position Gramsci described from his prison cell.

Now let me tell you what history says happens when an ideology captures a generation and turns it against everything that came before.

China, 1966. Mao unleashes the Cultural Revolution and hands it to the youth. Students become Red Guards. Their mission: destroy the "Four Olds," old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. Temples, books, art, centuries of history, smashed.

In August 1966, at a girls' school in Beijing, students beat their vice principal, Bian Zhongyun, to death. She was one of the first. Teachers across the country were humiliated, tortured, killed by the children they had taught.

In 1970, a 16-year-old boy named Zhang Hongbing denounced his own mother for criticizing Mao. She was executed. He spent the rest of his life trying to apologize for it.

Children were taught that loyalty to the Party came before loyalty to their parents. Historians estimate the Cultural Revolution killed somewhere between hundreds of thousands and millions of people.

The Soviet Union did it first. It turned a boy named Pavlik Morozov into a national hero for denouncing his father. Generations of Soviet children were raised on his story.

Cambodia, 1975. The Khmer Rouge declare Year Zero. Teenagers with rifles empty the cities. Wearing glasses was enough to mark you as an intellectual. In four years, roughly a quarter of the population was dead.

Every time, the same pattern. Take the young. Teach them that the past is guilty. Teach them that their parents, their teachers, their history are the enemy. Then give them power.

So when you see statues pulled down, words banned, books rewritten, and parents treated as obstacles in their own children's schools, understand what you're looking at. It's not the end of the story. It's the opening act. It always starts with the young, and it always starts with good intentions.

If the West ever gets its Marxist youth revolution, it won't end in Scandinavia. It will end the way it has ended every single time it was tried for real. And we will have learned nothing.

Thiel saw the number. I'm telling you where it leads.

The answer is not to hate the young. It's to give them back a stake in the system. Let them build. Let them buy a home. Make college worth its price or skip it. Let them start companies instead of drowning in debt. A generation that owns something defends it. A generation that owns nothing will burn it down.

I come from your future. Don't let your children write the next chapter of this story.

[Ari Fleischer @AriFleischer]

Update: 24 Hours later, NBC Nightly News covered it. CBS and ABC Nightly News still have not.

Nor has the NYT.

[Squonkistador @Squonkistador]

@MichaelRapaport Far too many Americans vote as if they’re picking a homecoming king. They put personality above policy, even when it goes against their own positions and interests.

[Igazsag @Jan6Patriot]

@MichaelRapaport The Republican Party absolutely sucks.

The Democratic Party is an existential threat to US citizens.

I don’t vote for Republicans because I like Republicans. I vote against Democrats because they are batshit crazy, evil lunatics.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

My dear American friends, in my last post I gave you a snapshot of where France stands today. Now let me show you how we got here. I want you to see the whole movie before you buy the ticket.

After the war, France was a machine. We called it the Trente Glorieuses, thirty glorious years. We built Concorde, the most beautiful aircraft ever made. We built a fleet of nuclear reactors in about fifteen years and gave ourselves some of the cleanest, cheapest electricity in the world. We built Ariane and put Europe in space. We built the TGV, the fastest train on earth. We invented the Minitel, an online network in millions of homes before most of you had heard of the internet. We were not a museum. We were builders.

Then came 1981. François Mitterrand. Think of him as our Bernie Sanders, except he actually won. At his side, in the office next to his at the Élysée, sat a 37-year-old prodigy named Jacques Attali, his special adviser for the next ten years. The brightest minds of the left, convinced they could run an economy from a ministry.

Here's what they did. They governed with Communist ministers. In 1982 they nationalized dozens of banks and the biggest industrial groups in the country: Paribas, Suez, Saint-Gobain, Thomson, Pechiney, Rhône-Poulenc. They lowered the retirement age to 60. They cut the work week to 39 hours and added a fifth week of paid vacation. They created a wealth tax. They hired massively into the public sector.

Reality hit in less than two years. Capital fled, inflation ran wild, and the franc was devalued three times. In March 1983 Mitterrand had to slam on the brakes and impose austerity just to stay in the European monetary system.

But here's the trick: the brakes never reversed anything. They just slowed the ratchet. The so-called right came back with Jacques Chirac, and nothing was undone. Under Chirac's presidency, France passed the 35-hour work week. Left or right, every government added one more program, one more rule, one more tax, and nobody ever took one away.

At the same time, the political class did something even more destructive than bad economics. It turned the youth into a political instrument. Instead of teaching young people, including millions of children of immigrants, to love the country they lived in, it taught them a story of guilt and grievance: France as the oppressor, France as the thing to resent. You cannot integrate people into a country you've taught them to despise. We are living with the consequences of that narrative today, in our schools, our suburbs, our streets.

Then forty years of slow decline, all the way to Macron. And the story has a perfect ending. In 2007, Jacques Attali chaired a commission on how to unleash French growth. Its deputy rapporteur was a young civil servant named Emmanuel Macron. The commission proposed more than 300 reforms to free the economy. Almost none were ever implemented. Even the men who built the system knew it wasn't working, and even they couldn't undo it.

No balanced budget since 1974. Public spending around 57% of GDP. Debt above 3,300 billion euros. Growth stuck under 1%.

Now the number that should keep you up at night. In 1995, GDP per person in France was about $27,000. In America, about $29,000. We were neck and neck. Today France is around $49,000. America is around $90,000. You are now nearly twice as rich per person as we are.

What changed? Not our talent. Not our engineers. Not our schools of mathematics. The only thing that changed is that we went all in on socialism. The 35 hours, the endless regulation, the taxes that chase out anyone who builds, the belief that the state should do everything and the individual should ask permission for everything.

There's a line people love to attribute to Einstein: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We tried. For forty years, we tried. Every government promised that one more program, one more tax, one more regulation would finally fix things. You just saw where it got us.

So if you choose the Democratic Party, which is literally turning socialist in front of your eyes, you will deserve what comes next.

Let me tell you exactly what will happen if you go down that road. Nobody will vote for decline. Every single measure will sound generous, compassionate, reasonable. Your builders will slowly leave or stop building. Your state will grow every year and never shrink. Your debt will compound. And in thirty years, your kids will look at a chart like the one I just described and wonder when it all went wrong.

You still have something we lost. You have Elon Musk sending rockets to orbit and landing them on their tail. You have Palmer Luckey building the defense industry of the future. You have Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, and thousands of founders nobody has heard of yet, building in garages right now.

Trust your entrepreneurs. Don't trust your politicians.

I come from your future. Don't make it yours.

[Scott Jennings @ScottJenningsKY]

This is a good video explaining the Greenland deal, and it further makes everyone who flipped out about it look even dumber than they already did.

[Katie Pavlich @KatiePavlich]

The follow up question to El-Sayed’s denial, which is a lie, is to ask him if the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization (it is) and see what he says

[Glenn Beck @glennbeck]

Last week, we aired our latest special Mapping the DSA Machine, just for our Torch subscribers. After the premiere, 97% of them voted to release it to the public immediately because they believe it's too critical to keep behind a paywall this close to the midterms.

And I agree. So today at 12 ET. We're dropping the entire special on YouTube. You need to see this.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

My post about France went viral. Thousands of likes. Many Americans told me: "Democrats aren't socialists. America will never be France." I want to answer that seriously, step by step.

Start with a simple observation. Look at what has gotten cheaper in America over the last 25 years: TVs, phones, software, clothes, toys. Now look at what has exploded: college tuition, healthcare, childcare, housing.

What separates the two lists? The first lives in competitive markets. The second is exactly where government is most involved: subsidies, mandates, licensing, zoning, regulation.

College. Washington lends students almost unlimited money. Universities know the money will always come, so they raise tuition and hire more administrators. The student pays the bill for twenty years. More government money, higher prices.

Housing. Why can't a nurse buy a home in the city where she works? Not because of capitalism. Because of zoning laws, permits, environmental reviews, years of procedure to build a single building. The most expensive places to live in America are the places where it's hardest to build. When building is nearly illegal, prices explode.

Healthcare. The patient almost never sees the price. A third party pays, regulations limit who can compete, and costs climb year after year with no one able to say no.

So here is the trap. The problems you suffer from are not the failure of free markets. They are the places where the market has already been replaced by the state. And the solution you're being offered is more of the same.

That's the Trojan horse. It always works the same way. A real problem. A generous-sounding promise. A program that makes things worse. Then the failure of that program becomes the argument for the next one. People who lived under communism in Poland learned to recognize the lie and the mask the lie wears. The lie never presents itself as a lie. It presents itself as compassion.

In France we are at the end of that road. Debt we can never repay. Young people who can't afford a home. Our best people leaving. And every few years our cities burn. Nobody voted for this. They voted for one more generous promise, fifty years in a row.

If you're a Republican, share this with the Democrat in your life. Not to win an argument. To start a conversation.

If you're a Democrat, I'm not asking you to switch teams. I'm asking you to look at the pattern. Wherever the state took over, life became unaffordable. Don't fix the failures of government with more government.

Stay American. Ask for less state, not more.

[Everett Stern @EverettStern1]

Dear Secretary Bessent @SecScottBessent,

My name is Everett Stern. In 2010 I was a compliance officer at @HSBC. From a back office in New Castle, Delaware, I watched billions of dollars move to drug cartels, sanctioned regimes, and terrorist organizations. The enemies of the United States. I documented it, I escalated it, and when the bank would not act, I took it to the @FBI, the @CIA, and eventually the @SECGov.

The result was a $1.92 billion settlement. At the time, it was one of the largest in American history. It was also about five weeks of the bank’s profit. Not one banker was charged. Not one went to prison.

I paid a different price. I lost my career, my savings, and my place in the industry I had trained for. I was blacklisted. Every door in American finance closed at once. I slept on a camping cot in a 300 square foot apartment because I could not afford a bed, and I waited tables at @PFChangs to eat. I tell you this not for sympathy, but so you understand that I know exactly what it costs to do the right thing in American finance, and exactly how little the system does in return.

I made that sacrifice because I believed it would change something.

Yesterday, your department fined @BankofAmerica $1.2 billion for failing to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, some of it tied by your own findings to Chinese laundering networks, narcotics, and the southwest border, alongside 475 apparent sanctions violations touching Russia, Iran, and global terrorism. The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act.

Fourteen years after HSBC. A bank with “America” in its name. And once again, not one individual charged.

Secretary Bessent, I want to say plainly what I believe you already know. The fines are not working.

A fine is paid by shareholders, absorbed by the balance sheet, and forgotten by the next earnings call. Bank of America reported earnings this morning. Nobody who set the alert thresholds, nobody who decided the 2024 cease and desist could wait, nobody who chose the backlog over the law will lose a single thing they value. Their lives are untouched. That is the entire reason the behavior repeats.

This is money laundering. This is blood money. Money that reaches a cartel buys fentanyl that kills Americans. Money that reaches a terrorist organization buys the next attack. This country has fought a war on drugs and a war on terror for decades, at enormous cost in lives and treasure, and all the while we have allowed the financing to flow through institutions we charter and regulate. Cut off the money and we win. We have never seriously tried.

There is also a question of equal justice that I cannot let go.

Before I walked into the FBI building to report HSBC, I stopped in front of the Great Seal on the wall and read the words engraved beneath it: “Justice is the defense of our liberty.” I believed that. I still want to. But every day in this country, people go to prison for crimes that are nothing next to moving money for the people who want Americans dead. A suit, a title, and a corporate badge should not be a shield from the consequences that apply to everyone else. If a street dealer goes to prison for what he sells, the banker who moved the cartel’s money should be standing next to him.

I also want to raise something that is rarely said in these conversations. Why has no one inside Bank of America come forward the way I did? The answer is that everyone in American banking knows what happened to me, and to the whistleblowers who came after. The last person who spoke up is the only policy anyone believes. That is a culture problem, and it starts with leadership, in the banks and in the agencies that regulate them.

This is not a political issue. It has spanned administrations of both parties. It is a national security issue, and I am asking you to treat it as one.

Three things would change the math overnight.

Refer individuals for criminal prosecution. Not the analyst in the queue. The executives who set the thresholds and chose the risk. One banker in handcuffs would do more than every fine in Treasury’s history combined.

End “too big to jail.” An institution cannot be too big to fail and too big to jail at the same time. If it is the first, it must be held to a higher standard, not a lower one.

And if Bank of America will not act as America’s bank, review its charter. A national charter is a privilege granted on behalf of the American people. It should be conditioned on not moving money for the people trying to kill them.

Secretary Bessent, you said yesterday that these actions send a clear message that even the biggest institutions are not above the law. With respect, the institution was never the problem. The people inside it are above the law, and they know it. Until that changes, I will keep writing letters like this one, and the next bank will keep paying the next fine.

I gave up everything I had to stop this. I am asking you to use the power you have to finish it.

Respectfully,

Everett A. Stern
HSBC Whistleblower
Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit

[Jeffery Mead @the_jefferymead]

Absolutely love to see black democrats in Michigan coming out against Abdul El Sayed.

The man is a threat to our republic and way of life.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.

I come from your future.

In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream.

Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.

The promise was protection. The result is stagnation.

The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.

I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has.

Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France?

Trust me. You don’t want to be France.

[Jonathan Turley @JonathanTurley]

Zohran Mamdani continues to govern from a place of utter fantasy. The mayor just declared "ICE should not be in this city at all." He would be more successful yelling at a coming winter storm. He has no more authority to exclude immigration enforcement than he does to ban winter.