I hope everyone had a great 4th of July. I know @realDonaldTrump and family did.
250 years ago we declared independence from a king who ran the colonies as a family business. In just 18 months the Trumps have made King George look like an amateur.
A $620 million Pentagon loan, the largest in the program’s history, to a company Don Jr.’s firm bought into three months before.
An Air Force drone contract to a startup the princelings took public through a golf course company they own a piece of.
The Army’s largest drone motor order ever, to a company where Don Jr. sits on the board and holds millions in stock.
A $24 million Pentagon robotics contract to the company that employs Eric as Chief Strategy Advisor.
A stake in the largest undeveloped tungsten deposit on earth, in Kazakhstan, backed by $1.6 billion in US government support.
Jared’s fund seeded with $2 billion from the Saudi crown prince, now $6.2 billion, 99% of it foreign money from Gulf governments. Over $110 million in fees collected from the Saudis alone. He negotiates American foreign policy with the governments that pay him.
$2.3 billion from crypto ventures their father regulates. More than a million people bought in and lost $2.3 billion. The money didn’t grow. It simply moved from the subjects pockets to the crown’s coffers.
And the next one is already drafted. A proposed ATF rule that will allow guns to be shipped straight to your front door. The government’s own estimate is 3.3 million home gun deliveries a year. Don Jr. sits on the board of the online gun megastore built to cash in. He holds 300,000 shares.
And that’s only the fraction they’ve allowed us to see. Not one subpoena served. Not one search executed. Why hide anything when you own the investigators?
Me? They searched a laptop for six years. Federal prosecutors. Grand juries. Subpoena power. Congressional hearings. They found nothing. I made about $200k a year selling paintings when my Dad was President, and they made my paintings part of an impeachment inquiry.
For six years they’ve asked Where’s Hunter? What about the laptop?
Wrong questions. The right one is 250 years old. Does America belong to a family?
They’ve given their answer. Long live the King.
This breaks my heart. 💔
Look closely at this 14-year-old girl. Her name was Czesława Kwoka. In the photo, you can see a small cut on her lip and a haunting fear in her eyes. Just moments before this picture was taken, a guard had whipped her across the face with a stick. Czesława did not understand why she was being hit.
She did not understand why she was in a place called Auschwitz. She was just a child, and she was terrified.
Czesława was born in a small Polish village called Wólka Złojecka. She was a Catholic girl who lived a simple life until the horror of the Holocaust reached her home. In late 1942, she and her mother were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Her mother died just a month after they arrived. Czesława was left all alone in a world of striped uniforms and barbed wire.
The man behind the camera was Wilhelm Brasse. He was not a Nazi soldier. He was a fellow prisoner, a professional photographer from Poland who had been arrested because he refused to swear allegiance to Hitler.
The Nazis forced him to take identification photos of every person who entered the camp. He took over 40,000 of these "mugshots," capturing the faces of men, women, and children who were marked for death.
Brasse never forgot the day Czesława walked into his studio. He remembered her beauty and her absolute innocence. He watched as a female guard, a Kapo, lost her temper and struck the girl. Brasse recalled the moment vividly in a later documentary.
He said: "She was so young and so terrified. The girl didn't understand why she was there and what they were saying to her. Then a female Kapo took a stick and hit her in the face."
He watched the young girl cry. He saw her use her hand to wipe the blood and tears from her face before he had to click the shutter. Brasse wanted to help her, but he knew that any movement or word of protest would mean his own death.
"To tell the truth, I felt as though I had been hit myself, but I couldn't intervene," he admitted. "It would have been fatal. You couldn't say absolutely anything."
Czesława was murdered on March 12, 1943. She was one of 230,000 children and adolescents who were sent to Auschwitz. Most of them did not survive.
When the war was ending and the Soviet army was approaching, the Nazis ordered Brasse to burn all the photographs. They wanted to destroy the evidence of their crimes.
However, Brasse chose to risk his life one last time. He and another prisoner managed to hide thousands of negatives in the barracks. Because of his bravery,
Czesława’s face was not erased from history. Her eyes still stare at us today, demanding that we acknowledge what happened to her.
After the war, Wilhelm Brasse returned to his hometown. He tried to go back to his old life, but he found that he could no longer take pictures. The faces of the victims were burned into his mind.
"Despite having a Kodak camera, I couldn't bring myself to photograph again; I had a repulsion to it," he explained. He spent the rest of his life working in a deli, carrying the weight of those 40,000 faces until he died in 2012.
When we look at Czesława, we are not looking at a statistic; we are looking at a human being who deserved a future. History is made of individual lives, and it is our duty to protect the humanity of every person, especially when the world around us turns to darkness.
This is only one story among thousands. Behind every photograph from Auschwitz lies a human life, a family, and a future that was stolen. The full history reveals far more than what one image can show.
A 14-year-old girl. A single photograph. And a story the world was never meant to forget.
Post credit on Fb to: Strange stupid or silly signs.
Donald Trump told you the ballroom would not cost taxpayers a dime. He told you donors were covering it. He even claimed the builders offered to do it for free.
None of that was true.
New reporting shows the White House secretly handed out a no-bid contract worth up to $500 million.
They routed the deal through the Executive Residence office, the one that normally buys White House furniture and art, because it is exempt from the competitive bidding rules every other federal agency has to follow. They even claimed disclosing the project would compromise national security.
The cost estimate has already tripled, from $200 million to $600 million, with half of it landing on taxpayers. The contractor stands to clear tens of millions in profit.
A federal judge already ruled the president has no authority to demolish the East Wing and build this thing. He is doing it anyway.
This is your money, spent in secret, on a vanity project, with the rules deliberately dodged.
More corruption, plain and simple.
https://t.co/ESgm65Trde