Roland Murphy

Researcher, Editor, Reporter, Writer, Industry Analyst, Chef

[Ethan Brooks @alt_w_v_g]

A deal came across my desk this week

Largest revenue-collecting enterprise in America:
> 71M customers
> 185M people funding it
> Mandatory participation
> No competitors
> No churn

On paper it's the best business model I've ever seen, so I ran diligence

It's Social Security

Put my analyst on the financials:
> He came back in 4 hours
> He did not look well

Started with the revenue model:
> 12.4% of every dollar you earn
> 6.2% withheld from your paycheck
> 6.2% paid by your employer, which is your money taking a longer route
> Applied to the first $184,500 of income, then it stops

That's the collection engine

Then I traced where the money goes

First finding:
> Nothing was set aside
> The money comes in from workers and goes out to retirees the same month
> The surplus got spent the moment it arrived
> The "trust fund" everyone talks about is $2.56T of the government holding IOUs from itself
> It has paid out more than it took in every year since 2021
> Last year the shortfall hit $160B
> I asked him where the actual money was
> He said "it already left, sir"

Second finding:
> The model only works if the people paying in can cover the people cashing out
> In 1960 there were more than 5 workers for every person collecting a check
> Today there are fewer than 3
> In 20 years there will be fewer than 2.5
> And 4.1M Americans are turning 65 every year right now
> The largest wave of retirements in the country's history
> My son was at the table
> He looked at the chart
> He said "so fewer and fewer people are paying for more and more people, and at some point it stops working?"
> I said "that's the structure, yes"
> He went back to his cereal
> My analyst looked up from his laptop
> He said "sir, with respect, this looks like a pyramid scheme"
> I corrected him
> A pyramid scheme is illegal
> This one is mandatory

Third finding:
> The headline says the money runs out in 2034
> Then my analyst found the footnote
> It is not one fund
> The old-age and survivors fund and a separate disability fund, kept apart by law
> The 2034 number blends them
> Un-blend them and the retirement side, the one almost everyone is counting on, goes first
> Not someday. Not a generation from now
> The fourth quarter of 2032
> After that the math only allows it to pay 78 cents on every dollar it promised
> A 22% cut. Automatic. No vote required.

What it would take to close the gap:
> Raise the 12.4% payroll tax to roughly 16.8%
> Cut every benefit by more than 20%, immediately and permanently
> Or some combination of the two

A remediation plan that's actually passed: none.

Pulled the cap table:
> The first person ever to collect a monthly check was a woman named Ida May Fuller
> She paid in $24.75
> Her employer paid another $24.75, which was also her money
> She collected $22,888.92
> More than 460 times what went in

The model front-loaded its winners

My wife read it over my shoulder

She did not argue with any of it

She never does

She just looked at me, then looked at the ceiling, and said nothing

She thinks I take things too far

She also thinks I'm right

Here's my diligence conclusion:
> Took your money for 40 years
> Spent it the month it arrived
> Set nothing aside
> Built a model that runs on demographics it no longer has
> Left a 22% cut to trigger in 2032
> Has no fix that ever passed

In any other deal we'd have a word for this

In this one we call it your retirement

I'm not saying anything

The economic model is saying it

Make common sense common again

Plz fix. Thx.

Sent from my iPhone

[Insurrection Barbie @DefiyantlyFree]

The DSA’s winning power is not socialism, it’s the fusion of the socialist electoral machine with Muslim/South Asian community organizing and an SJP-bred candidate coalition, bound together by anti-Zionism.

And everyone wants to talk about communism because that’s actually not the issue deciding these last races in New York.

The voter surge that delivered the mayoral race was Muslim and South Asian, and Mamdani said so on tape. “We increased the turnout of Muslims by 60%, the turnout of South Asians by 40%.” South Asian turnout went from 15% in 2021 to 43% in 2025 (DRUM Beats’ analysis of Board of Elections data, reported by City & State and Democracy Now!).

The campaign canvassed 100+ mosques and reached 200,000 Muslim voters (DSA’s own Democratic Left, and Jacobin). 87% of South Asian voters went for Mamdani.

The candidate ground game comes out of the campus Palestine movement, not labor. Mamdani co-founded SJP at Bowdoin; Chevalier co-founded Columbia’s CUAD with Mahmoud Khalil and led the encampment (JTA, JPost, Times of Israel, all mainstream). The organizers being converted into officeholders trained in SJP first.

The coalition’s founding story is the Muslim-immigrant/radical-left fusion. DSA’s own writers date it to 2017, Mamdani as paid canvasser for Khader El-Yateem, “the alliance between Muslim immigrant communities and radical politics that contributed heavily to Mamdani’s primary win.”

The binding issue, is Zionism, not capitalism. The 2025 convention made support for Israel an expellable offense. They de-endorsed AOC and tried to purge Bowman over Israel before he was ousted. There is no parallel purge over economic heterodoxy.

The decisive electoral weapon against the establishment was Palestine. Chevalier beat a five-term Hispanic Caucus chair in a district with few Jews, running on Khalil’s detention and “bought by the Israeli lobby.” JTA: first time incumbents lost seats for being too pro-Israel.

The DSA is not a communist movement that happens to hate Israel. It is an anti-Zionist coalition, built on Muslim and South Asian community organizing and a candidate class bred in the campus Palestine movement, that happens to use communism.

Socialism is the Trojan horse; the Muslim-Palestine axis is what actually generates the candidates, the new voters, and the only cause the coalition will enforce on threats of expulsion.

Strip the Palestine-Muslim alignment and the socialism reverts to the shrinking debating society it was in 2024.

The capture is real, the people entering like Maurice Isserman took the house, but the thing that captured it isn’t Marx. It’s anti-Zionism, carried by the organizing networks built around it.

[Harrison Krank @HarrisonKrank]

Notice how they want to tax them because they are billionaires, NOT because they need more tax revenue.

It is purely punitive

[Insurrection Barbie @DefiyantlyFree]

Apartheid means institutionalized racism.

In Israel, you can be a Christian, a Muslim or a Jew and own property, vote and serve in government.

There are Muslims in the IDF.

Qatar is an apartheid state. Christians in Qatar worship mainly at one place: the Mesaimeer Religious Complex in the Abu Hamour area on the outskirts of Doha, informally nicknamed “Church City.” They cannot own property, vote or be in government.

You can have your own opinions, you are not entitled to your own facts.

[MAGA Voice @MAGAVoice]

BREAKING: President Trump just posted a video of Byron Donalds EXPOSING how bad the Senate is:

“Oh man… the Senate SUCKS”

FIRE JOHN THUNE

[Handre @Handre]

Germany, 1948. The Reichsmark is worthless. Cigarettes function as currency. Factory output sits at half its 1936 level, and the Allied occupation runs a price-control regime so absurd that farmers feed grain to livestock rather than sell it at the dictated price. Then Ludwig Erhard walks into a radio studio on June 20 and tells the German people the controls are gone. He did not ask the occupation authorities first. He told General Lucius Clay afterward that he hadn't altered the regulations, he had abolished them.

What followed embarrassed every Keynesian planner watching from Washington and London.

The Deutsche Mark replaced the Reichsmark at brutal terms: roughly 100 old marks for 6.5 new ones. Hard money, scarce by design. The black markets emptied overnight because goods reappeared in shop windows the moment prices could speak. Industrial production jumped over 50 percent in the second half of 1948 alone. And here is the part the textbooks bury: through the 1950s, as the economy grew at better than 8 percent a year, the cost of living stayed remarkably flat. Germans got richer while prices held or fell. Productivity outran the money supply, which is exactly what's supposed to happen when a central bank keeps its greedy paws to itself.

Falling prices alongside roaring growth, rising real wages, and a currency people actually wanted to hold rewarded Erhard's Germany. Deflation is not the disease. It is the natural reward for producing more than you did last year.

The Bundesbank inherited this discipline and guarded the Mark with a stinginess that drove politicians to fury for forty years. That stinginess built the strongest economy in Europe. Then the same political class buried the Mark under the euro in 2002 and handed monetary policy to people who consider 2 percent annual theft a "target."

Erhard proved sound money and free prices rebuild a bombed nation in a decade. Every finance minister since has worked very hard to forget it.

[Roland Murphy @murphy_roland]

Amen.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just proved that ownership in America is a legal fiction.

Musk: “You get taxed on what you earn, you get taxed on what you buy, and you get taxed on what you own.”

Think about what property tax actually means.

You worked for decades. Paid it off in full. The deed is in your name.

Stop paying the government its annual fee. Watch them take it and sell it to someone who will.

You never owned that house. You were leasing it from an entity you never signed a contract with.

Income tax tells the same truth in softer packaging.

The government does not take a portion of your earnings. They decide how much of your own labor you are permitted to keep.

That is not semantics. It is a confession of who the system believes your time belongs to first.

Sales tax buries itself in the receipt. Two people exchange value voluntarily. A third party who contributed nothing takes a cut simply for allowing it to happen.

Now stack all three.

Taxed when you create. Taxed when you spend. Taxed when you hold. Taxed again when you die and try to pass it to your children.

At no point in that cycle does the system recognize your output as yours.

Because money is not an abstraction. It is crystallized human lifespan.

Every dollar taxed is an hour you already lived, already bled for, already gone.

The state is not managing an economy. It is claiming dominion over time you will never get back.

And spending it on systems you never asked for and actively oppose.

The institution extracting all of it faces zero obligation to perform. A contractor who delivers nothing gets fired. A bureaucracy that burns through trillions gets a budget increase the next fiscal year.

SpaceX pays taxes to the agencies that obstruct its launches. Tesla funds the regulators drafting rules to shield its competitors.

The builders are not subsidizing government. They are financing their own friction.

The tax code is 74,000 pages long. Not because the economy demands it. Because the extraction had to be buried in enough complexity that you would stop asking who it was designed to protect.

The past belonged to the people who taxed the world.

The future belongs to the people who build it.

[Roland Murphy @murphy_roland]

@libsoftiktok @Starbucks @FOX2now I worked part time in the kitchen of a Whore Foods for a few months several years ago. They made it very clear at multiple points during orientation that any attempt to interfere with a robbery was immediate termination, no exceptions.

[Roland Murphy @murphy_roland]

@SharylAttkisson A near perfect summation.

[Sharyl Attkisson 🕵️‍♂️💼🥋 @SharylAttkisson]

Let me break it down in a simple way that I’ve been reporting from the beginning.
To invent a vaccine for a disease that didn’t exist, our scientific Einsteins used taxpayer money to partner with communist China to create the dangerous virus in a lab—So that they could create a vaccine for it.
Covid was a result of primarily US funded vaccine research, and that’s the thing they could not let you know.
They stopped at nothing to obfuscate, misdirect, cover their tracks, protect themselves, and controversialize anyone telling the truth.
The scientific establishment and media aided and abetted.
I can think of no more impactful, crimes and violations that have occurred in our lifetime.

[Roland Murphy @murphy_roland]

@AlBuffalo2nite @CynicalPublius But keeping it divided keeps his side in power and making huge amounts of money.

[Ramin Ekhtiar @raminrealtalk]

A man who ran California colleges for 36 years says he’s never seen anything like this.

1.2 million fake students. 90 colleges. 80% of the campuses.

Your kid gets turned away so a bot can collect the financial aid.

This is California.

https://t.co/XehgycSOLG

[Sharyl Attkisson 🕵️‍♂️💼🥋 @SharylAttkisson]

There’s another thing I’ve written and spoken about that Dr Fauci didn’t tell the truth about but nobody else flagged.
As he was going on comedy shows and testifying to Congress early on that Covid was “ten times deadlier than flu,” he actually co-published a scientific paper stating the opposite: Covid was about like a bad flu season.
At the time, I called his office for an interview — and although he was never shy, he wouldn’t agree to an interview with me.
I then asked his office to explain which of his statements was correct. One or the other had to be false, by definition.
Fauci’s office declined to answer.

[Selene Mariposa @Selene_Mariposa]

The World Cup has turned America into a discovery channel for the rest of the world.

And they are not handling it well.
In the best possible way.

Here is what they are discovering:

Free public restrooms. Europeans pay every time.
Free water at every restaurant. Just appears.
Free refills. Coffee. Sodas. Iced tea. Unlimited.
Free chips and salsa before you even order.
Free warm bread with dinner.
Ice in drinks like civilized people.
Air conditioning everywhere. Not a moral debate. A fact.
Parking lots attached to the actual place you are going.
Drive throughs where the food comes to the car while you sit in it.
Ranch dressing by the gallon.
Tex-Mex that cannot be explained only experienced.
Dental care that actually works.
Buccee’s. There are no words for Buccee’s.

Then they found the grocery stores.

Five of them within one mile.
Each one the size of an aircraft hangar.
Burgers. Steaks. Brisket. Ribs. Pulled pork. Lamb. Veal. Every cut of every animal ever domesticated by human civilization available in one refrigerated aisle at ten in the morning on a Tuesday.

The Germans stood in the meat section for forty five minutes.
In silence.
Processing.

They finally understand why we do not have trains.

We have roads wide enough for the cars we actually drive.
Parking lots the size of small European countries.
Airports in every city worth visiting.

Why would we need trains.

The Germans are taking ranch home by the bottle.
The Dutch found queso and briefly lost the ability to speak.
The Japanese are photographing HEB like it is the Louvre.
The Czechs are weeping in West, Texas.

Welcome to America.
Everything is free, enormous, air conditioned, comes with chips, and has five grocery stores within a mile that will sell you any cut of any animal you have ever imagined.

Write that down. 🦋

[Gina Milan @ginamilan_]

I’m sick to my freaking stomach reading Tulsi Gabbard’s declassified bombshells. They laid out the entire treasonous plot: weaponizing the Zelensky phone call to impeach Trump, with Rudy Giuliani squarely in their crosshairs next.

This wasn’t politics—it was a straight-up coup by corrupt deep state actors to overthrow the will of the American people.

These people belong in prison for this shit. Deeply disturbing and downright terrifying.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Beaucoup de figures de gauche, aux US comme en Europe, qualifient Musk d'extrême droite. Certains vont jusqu'au mot « nazi ».

J'ai fait l'inverse de l'accusation : lire avant de juger. Deux biographies. Des dizaines d'heures d'interviews et de documentaires. Zéro once de racisme détectée.

Ce que j'ai trouvé, c'est une obsession constante pour la liberté : rachat de Twitter au nom de la liberté d'expression, réintégration des comptes bannis, publication des Twitter Files, ouverture du code de l'algorithme, open-source de Grok, brevets Tesla libérés en 2014, Starlink rallumé pour les Iraniens coupés du net pendant les manifestations et pour l'Ukraine, refus répété des demandes de censure étatiques.

Maintenant, faisons l'expérience de pensée que ses accusateurs ne font jamais. Imaginez que Musk soit réellement evil.

Cet homme possède un réseau de satellites qui couvre la planète, soit une capacité de surveillance quasi totale. Il possède la place publique numérique la plus influente du monde. Il possède la première fortune à 1000 milliards de l'Histoire, depuis l'IPO de SpaceX le 12 juin. Aucun individu n'a jamais concentré autant de leviers.

Un Musk réellement malveillant, avec ça dans les mains, ne tolérerait pas une seconde qu'on le traite de nazi H24 sur sa propre plateforme. Il bannirait. Il surveillerait. Il écraserait. On serait déjà dans 1984.

Or regardez la réalité : les comptes qui l'accusent de nazisme tweetent toujours. Tous les jours. Sans entrave. Sur son réseau. Avec son algorithme. La dystopie totalitaire qu'on lui prête se démontre par l'absence du goulag.

Voilà le retournement. 1984 le contrôle de la parole, la surveillance de masse, la désignation publique des hérétiques ce n'est pas son projet. C'est le fantasme de ceux qui l'accusent. L'accusation décrit toujours l'accusateur.

C'est du Girard à l'état pur : on désigne un bouc émissaire pour ne pas voir le mécanisme qu'on porte soi-même. Celui qui hurle « nazi » rêve souvent, en silence, du pouvoir de bannir, de ficher, de faire taire.

L'homme qui aurait tous les moyens de bâtir 1984 est précisément celui qui laisse ses pires détracteurs parler. Demandez-vous qui, dans cette histoire, rêve vraiment du télécran.

[DNI Tulsi Gabbard @DNIGabbard]

Today, on my final day as Director of National Intelligence, I’m releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Dr. Fauci provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, worked with politicized elements within the Intelligence Community to suppress the truth about his actions and hide the virus’ lab-leak origins, and lied to Congress while under oath in 2024. It’s time you know the truth.

https://t.co/3YJSstB7d4

[Roland Murphy @murphy_roland]

Dead right.

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

Joe Rogan lays out why the news will never seriously criticize pharmaceutical companies.

It isn't about selling you the drug in the ad. The ad buys something far more valuable.

ROGAN: "The funding for those commercials, a giant chunk of it is pharmaceutical drug companies."

"They don't do that because they want to sell drugs. They do that because now the news will not criticize the pharmaceutical drug company."

The product was never the pill. The product was the silence...

[Don Keith @RealDonKeith]

🚨Just a reminder that before Rupert Lowe’s Rape Gang Inquiry Report was released Piers Morgan said my claim of 250,000 girls being raped by Pakistani Muslim men in Britain was “utterly ridiculous.”

Cenk Uygur said that I was “making it up.”