(((RichardGCombs)))

Neolibertarian retired technical writer. After 38 years in Denver, I moved back to East TN in '21. My pronouns are thou, thee, thine.

[Caroline Sunshine @CSUNSHINE]

Stephen Miller didn’t let their killers in. You did.

[C3 @C_3C_3]

There have been over 66,000 Islamic terrorist attacks resulting in 250,000 deaths in the last 50 years.

But Islamophobia is the problem.

[Catturd ™ @catturd2]

John Thune has been purposely sabotaging Trump's agenda for 2 years, and he continues to do so.

Worthless, lazy, traitor.

[NEWSMAX @NEWSMAX]

GOP FLIPS MAINE SEAT: Former Maine Gov. Paul LePage has won a closely contested congressional race, delivering Republicans a rare pickup in an election dominated by Democratic victories nationwide.

Newsmax and The Associated Press called Maine's 2nd Congressional District race Thursday after state officials completed a ranked-choice voting tabulation.

LePage, 78, defeated Democrat Matt Dunlap, Maine's state auditor, with 50.8% of the vote to Dunlap's 49.2%.

[Race 🕊️ @multiplanet1]

During the worst weeks of the Model 3 production crisis, Elon Musk ordered what Tesla employees call "the surge." Every employee in the company, regardless of title, department, or job description, was sent to the Fremont factory to work on the production line. Software engineers bolted seats. Accountants assembled battery packs. Marketing directors ran quality checks. The entire company became a factory.

The surge was not voluntary. It was a directive. The message was clear: if this factory doesn't produce 5,000 cars per week, the company dies. Every person who works here has a job only if the factory succeeds. Therefore every person who works here now works in the factory.

Employees have described the surge as the most disorienting experience of their professional lives. A software engineer with 10 years of coding experience was handed a torque wrench and taught to bolt a seat rail to a track in under 60 seconds. The training took 20 minutes. The expectation was full productivity by the end of the first shift. The culture shock was total: the people who had been hired for their minds were now being asked for their hands.

The surge produced something that no management consultant could have predicted: the software engineers who worked on the production line for 2 weeks came back to their desks with a completely different understanding of what the factory needed from their software. The accountants who assembled battery packs understood the cost structure at a visceral level that no spreadsheet could communicate. The marketing directors who ran quality checks understood the product better than any focus group could teach them.

Elon's logic was dual. The obvious goal: more hands on the line produce more cars. The hidden goal: every employee who works the line once will never again design software, manage budgets, or create marketing for a product they don't physically understand. The surge was not just a production strategy. It was an education program delivered through crisis.

The 5,000 per week target was eventually hit during a sprint where the final cars were assembled in a tent in the parking lot because the factory building itself couldn't accommodate the pace. The tent production line became the symbol of the Model 3 production hell: a car company building cars in a tent, with software engineers on the line, because the CEO decided that dying was not an option and every hand in the company would prevent it.

The man who sends everyone to the factory when the factory is dying operates on a principle that most CEOs find unthinkable: there are no departments during a crisis. There is only the mission. And every person in the company either serves the mission directly or the mission fails. The surge was brutal. The surge saved Tesla. And every employee who survived it says the same thing: they never looked at the company the same way again.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

I think something is fundamentally broken inside the AI labs. Let me explain why.

Look at the builders. Elon in 2008, Tesla and SpaceX both weeks from death, putting his last dollars on the table. Jensen running Nvidia for years under the motto "we're 30 days from going out of business." Travis, kicked out of the company he built with his own hands. Building a company is a machine for humility. Reality hits you every single day. Customers don't care about your vision. Payroll doesn't care about your ego. The market punishes you the moment you start believing your own story. That's why real founders, whatever you think of them, end up grounded. They've been humiliated by reality enough times to know they can be wrong.

Dario's story started well. He left OpenAI at the end of 2020, with a group of researchers, because he didn't like how things were being run there. And on Sam, history proved him right: a board that fired him for not being "consistently candid," the war with Elon over turning a nonprofit into a profit machine, the Scarlett Johansson voice episode. Dario looked at all that and said: not like this. I genuinely believe he was sincere at the start.

But I think he got corrupted by two things.

The first is hubris. Five years from founding to one of the biggest IPOs in history. When the world validates everything you say that fast, you stop hearing the word no. You never get the humbling years Jensen and Elon got.

The second is a deeply collectivist vision of how humanity should be managed. The idea that AI is too dangerous for the many, so a small enlightened group must decide for everyone: who gets chips, which countries, which companies, which models. Jensen summed it up better than anyone: "He thinks AI is so scary, but only they should do it." That's not safety. That's central planning with a moral halo.

Now look at the last two weeks. Jensen goes down in a personal scandal. His private life is his business and his board made its call. But look at who was pushing. Anthropic put $40M into a political group that funded super PACs backing lawmakers who then co-signed the letter demanding Jensen explain himself. The man who stood in the way of chip export bans, the man Trump personally called to tell him to fight for his job, is gone. Days before Anthropic's IPO. And Nvidia is one of Anthropic's investors, which makes the whole thing even stranger.

I'm not saying Dario orchestrated it. Nobody has proven that. But Anthropic and this administration have been at war over AI policy for a long time, and Jensen was the industry's bridge to this White House. When the lab that preaches humility funds the political machine that ends up taking down its biggest ideological opponent, you're allowed to ask questions.

That's the core problem. People who've never been humbled by reality, convinced they're saving humanity, holding the most powerful technology ever built. That's the most dangerous kind of power: the kind that thinks it's virtuous.

Builders build. They don't take down other builders.

[(((RichardGCombs))) @rgcombs]

👇👇👇

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

It seems rather odd to me that we're told a government whose sole responsibility is to protect individual rights is unrealistic and unworkable.

Yet we're expected to believe that a government responsible for protecting rights, inventing new entitlements that conflict with those rights, managing the economy, regulating industries, controlling prices and wages, redistributing wealth, providing healthcare, housing, education, and retirement, creating jobs, guaranteeing incomes, directing investment, allocating resources, picking winners and losers, eliminating inequality, preventing poverty, managing the environment, and satisfying the ever-expanding demands of millions of individuals is somehow a practical necessity.

Apparently, asking politicians to perform one clearly defined function is an impossible fantasy.

But expecting them to manage virtually every aspect of human existence, reconcile countless conflicting interests, anticipate economic consequences, and satisfy everyone without violating anyone's rights is perfectly reasonable.

How did limiting government to one fundamental responsibility become the unrealistic proposition, while assigning it practically unlimited responsibilities became the realistic one?

[(((RichardGCombs))) @rgcombs]

Woohoo!

[Jaxon @jaxoncoder]

How the surge algorithm works and why it targets your work schedule.

Grocery stores operate on razor-thin net margins of roughly 1.7 to 2.5 percent. For years, executives have searched for a way to extract higher margins without scaring away customers with permanently high sticker prices. Dynamic pricing solves their problem by taxing urgency instead of raising the baseline price.

When an algorithm controls the shelf, prices respond to real-time demand triggers. Local weather APIs feed directly into the store server, allowing the system to nudge up the price of ice, sports drinks, and charcoal on a hot Friday afternoon, or raise the price of rock salt, batteries, and canned soup the moment a winter storm warning hits your zip code.

Even worse is the commuter penalty. Working parents almost always shop between 4:30 PM and 6:30 PM on weekdays or on Sunday afternoons. A retired shopper who buys groceries at 9:30 AM on a Tuesday sees the baseline price, while a working parent buying the exact same loaf of bread at 5:30 PM pays a rush-hour markup.

[Jaxon @jaxoncoder]

Walmart and Kroger are quietly rolling out an internal store technology across America that could either modernize retail or bankrupt the middle-class family budget.

Starting across thousands of locations heading into 2027, traditional paper price tags are being ripped off grocery shelves and replaced with cloud-connected digital screens. Raise the price of bottled water by 20 percent the second the afternoon temperature hits 90 degrees. Surge the cost of ground beef, milk, and sandwich bread between 5 PM and 6 PM when exhausted commuters are rushing home from work. Drop prices at 10 AM on a Tuesday, then hike them right back up the minute the after-school crowd walks through the sliding doors.

Every price change happens wirelessly in seconds from a central corporate dashboard. No store employee has to touch a single shelf.

Walmart has already signed a massive deployment deal with VusionGroup to wire 2,300 American supercenters with EdgeSense digital shelf rails by 2027. Kroger is expanding its own Microsoft-backed system called EDGE across hundreds of supermarkets. Over 60 million digital price tags are already blinking on US grocery aisles right now.

This is not supply chain inflation. This is Uber-style surge pricing built directly into the shelves where Americans buy baby formula, eggs, and medicine.

Last week I sat down for coffee with a former retail pricing director who spent 14 years building supermarket margin algorithms before leaving the industry. What he shared over the table completely changed how I look at a grocery aisle.

"Retailers just turned static shelves into live stock tickers. The question is not whether grocery chains will use instant price changes, because they already spent billions installing the hardware. The question is how much extra money a family of four will lose every week simply because both parents work until 5 PM and cannot shop during off-peak hours."

Here is how the digital grocery pricing system actually works, how it tracks you in the aisle, and the exact phone settings and checkout playbook you need to beat it.

[바울이 @kaleumeleu37968]

일곱번째 생존법.

위기가 오면 금, 달러, 귀금속을 챙기라고 말합니다. 하지만 보스니아 내전, 베네수엘라 국가 부도, 우크라이나 사태를 직접 겪은 생존자들의 증언은 정반대입니다.

전력망과 금융 시스템이 멈춘 순간, 종이돈은 불쏘시개일 뿐이고, 금괴는 당신과 가족을 약탈 1순위 표적으로 만드는 가장 위험한 금속입니다.

도시 인프라가 멈추고 마트 선반이 털린 지 72시간이 지나면, 세상은 오직 '물물교환(Barter)'으로만 돌아갑니다. 그 지하 경제에서 목숨을 지키며 거래하는 5가지 철칙입니다.

1. 금괴를 들고 나가는 순간, 당신은 걸어 다니는 ATM입니다.

100g짜리 금괴를 들고 나가서 쌀 1kg이나 통조림 2개를 살 수 있을까요? 상대방은 "거스름돈이 없으니 금괴 전부를 달라"고 강요하거나, 거래하는 척 뒤를 밟아 당신의 은신처 전체를 털어버립니다. 재난 초기 몇 달 동안 금은 쪼갤 수도 없고, 당장 먹을 수도 없는 쓸모없는 쇳덩이에 불과합니다. (귀금속은 치안과 사회가 어느 정도 재건되는 먼 훗날에나 통합니다.)

2. 1등 지하 화폐는 '라이터(Lighter)'입니다.

불을 피울 수 없는 생존자는 영하의 추위와 오염된 물 앞에서 며칠을 버티지 못합니다. 편의점에서 파는 흔한 일회용 라이터 하나는 약 1,000번에서 1,500번의 불을 피울 수 있는 '압축된 생명'입니다. 부피가 극도로 작고, 주머니에 여러 개가 들어가며, 누구나 가치를 직관적으로 알기 때문에 잔돈을 거슬러주거나 기본 화폐 단위로 쓰기에 완벽합니다.

3. 2등 화폐: 소금, 설탕, 그리고 '기호품'의 폭발적 위력.

인간은 소금 없이는 전해질 쇼크로 탈진해 쓰러집니다. 소금과 설탕은 음식을 보존하고 염장하는 데 없어서는 안 될 핵심 자산입니다.
그리고 극도의 공포와 스트레스에 짓눌린 사람들에게 인스턴트 커피(믹스커피), 담배, 미니 양주(소형 보드카/위스키)는 총알보다 더 강력한 협상 카드가 됩니다. 담배 몇 개비나 커피 몇 포로 결정적인 생존 정보를 사거나 검문소를 통과할 수 있습니다.

4. 3등 화폐: 항생제 연고와 소염진통제, 표준 규격 배터리.

분쟁·재난 지역의 가장 흔한 사망 원인은 총상이 아니라, 녹슨 못이나 깨진 유리에 긁힌 작은 상처의 패혈증입니다. 후시딘, 마데카솔 같은 항생제 연고 1개, 타이레놀이나 이부프로펜 1통은 금 한 돈보다 더 귀하게 대접받습니다. 여기에 라디오와 랜턴을 켤 수 있는 표준 AA, AAA 건전지는 마트가 문을 닫는 즉시 현금처럼 통용됩니다.

5. 물물교환 시 목숨을 건지는 OPSEC(보안) 3대 수칙.

물건을 바꾸러 나갈 때 지키지 않으면 반드시 당하는 수칙입니다:
- 절대 내 은신처 근처에서 거래하지 마라: 거래 장소는 집에서 최소 1km 이상 떨어진 시야가 확보된 중립 지대여야 합니다.
- 전 재산을 보여주지 마라: "집에 더 많다"는 말은 자살행위입니다. 오늘 바꿀 물건 딱 1~2개만 주머니에 넣고, "나도 이게 가진 것의 전부다"라는 태도를 끝까지 유지해야 합니다.
- 반드시 2인 1조로 움직여라: 1명이 거래하는 동안, 1명은 20~30m 밖 엄폐물 뒤에서 사각지대를 감시하고 퇴로를 지켜야 합니다. 혼자 나간 거래는 90% 약탈로 끝납니다.

결론:
위기가 닥쳤을 때 금고 속 골드바나 수표를 믿지 마세요.
주머니 속 라이터 10개, 소금 1kg, 타이레놀 몇 통, AA 배터리 20알이
어떤 귀금속보다 당신과 가족의 숨을 더 길게 이어줍니다.

[(((RichardGCombs))) @rgcombs]

@6News it's not Secretary of Defense, it's Secretary of War. The frickin election doesn't change the name of a cabinet department.

[Captain Eli @TheCaptainEli]

The richest man in the world spent his Sunday doing customer support.

For real.

A Grok Bot user replied to Elon Musk with a very specific problem. His $200 plan had lasted a full week of heavy use the week before. This week it was gone in 14 hours.

At most companies, the CEO never sees a message like that. It lands in a ticket queue, gets a template reply, and quietly dies there.

Elon Musk answered: "I will dig into this today."

Sixteen minutes later: "Grok Bot fixes for improved token efficiency and smarter behavior are underway."

Then, that night:

"Just did a round table review with the Grok Bot engineering team. Fixes are being implemented overnight and you should notice a dramatic improvement by tomorrow. If not, reply to this post and we will address any remaining issues right away."

Someone joked that it will never stop being funny how much time Elon Musk spends as a customer service agent for his own companies.

His answer was two words.

"I care."

People laugh because they think this is beneath him. Look closer and you see how he has always run his companies.

December 2016. A French entrepreneur, Loïc Le Meur, tweets at Elon Musk that the San Mateo Supercharger is always full of Teslas that finished charging hours ago.

Elon Musk replies within minutes: "You're right, this is becoming an issue. Supercharger spots are meant for charging, not parking. Will take action."

Six days later, Tesla rolls out an idle fee across the entire Supercharger network.

Ten years apart. Same reflex.

Every layer between the customer and the person who decides is a filter. Support filters for the manager. The manager filters for the VP. The VP filters for the board deck. By the time the problem reaches the top, it's a smooth line on a chart and nobody feels it anymore.

Elon Musk deletes the layers. He reads the raw signal himself, in public, with the whole world watching.

For a normal CEO that's terrifying. Every promise is on the record. Every "fixed by tomorrow" can be checked by tomorrow.

Public accountability compresses time. A fix that drifts for a quarter somewhere else gets shipped overnight, because the boss said overnight and everyone heard him.

And read that last line again. "Reply to this post." He just turned his replies into the biggest QA team on the planet.

Now zoom out.

We're entering the era where AI agents do real work for billions of people. They research, they buy, they run errands and small businesses. Soon, with Optimus, they'll move things in the physical world.

In that world the company that wins is the one with the shortest distance between a user's frustration and an engineer's keyboard.

Elon Musk has been shrinking that distance for twenty years. Teslas get better while parked in your garage, and now an AI gets fixed while its users sleep.

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

If you’re right wing and you can’t admit liberals (not communists) are way better at art and design and boutique coffee shops and restaurants, you’re not living in reality.

If you’re left wing and you can’t admit conservatives are way better at running cities and businesses and police departments, you’re not living in reality.

You step inside a beautiful coffee shop in the PNW and think “man, these liberals are great at this stuff…conservatives should take notes.” Then the moment you step outside and trip over a homeless drug zombie shooting up fentanyl on the sidewalk, you think “man these liberals are terrible at this stuff…they should really take notes from conservatives”

Communists make disgusting anti-beauty art, but classical liberals aren’t like that. Put the libs in charge of the coffee shops, put the conservatives in charge of city hall. This is how you get a city that is beautiful, clean, and functional.

If you can’t accept that, you need to check your tribalism. We are never getting rid of each other, so figure out how we strike a balance or else the communists swoop in and take everything from us while we quarrel over stupid bullshit…which is exactly what’s happening now.

[AYi @AYi_AInotes]

天呐，海底光缆统治世界的时代要结束了，又要见证历史了🤯。。
马斯克首次公布 Starlink V4 的极端参数：性能直接跳涨一百倍，光速天然快了一点四倍且不用绕大陆架，上千万条激光链路正在把地球通信主干搬上深空。

绝大多数人至今依然以为，星链只是给偏远山区、游艇和飞机提供网络补丁的边缘工具。
直到马斯克刚刚在最新的投资人会议上摊开底牌，很多人才第一次看懂 SpaceX 真正的阳谋：把构筑人类现代文明的海底光缆网络，从大洋深处连根拔起，彻底搬到太空。
这里藏着一个极度反直觉的物理常识：
光在太空真空中的传播速度，比在玻璃光纤里整整快了 40%。

更致命的是几何路径的差异。海底光缆必须顺着大陆架和海沟蜿蜒曲折地绕远路，而太空中的卫星激光链路，两点之间永远是沿着大圆航线在真空中直线对穿。这意味着在跨洋超长距离通信上，太空激光的延迟天然比地面光缆更低。
而阻碍这件事过去的唯一瓶颈，是带宽密度。
马斯克这次直接给出了技术迭代的量化终局：
从 V2 到即将落地的 V4 卫星，单星吞吐能力将直接迎来 100 倍的暴力跃升。
在更长期的宏大蓝图里，超过 10 万颗卫星组成的轨道阵列，每颗都将配备大约 100 个传输速率超 10 Tbps 的光学激光器，在地球外围织成一张百 Exabit 级别的无缝高速网状路由。
这已经不是在做卫星宽带了，这是在用火箭把全球互联网的核心骨干网整个重写一遍。
海底光缆容易被地质地震震断、被船锚挂伤，更深陷地缘博弈的物理封锁；而悬在头顶的真空激光网络，既没有折射损耗，也没有无法逾越的地理边界。
人类用了上百年时间，把铜线和光纤一根根沉入海底来连接彼此；而未来的文明动脉，注定要在没有阻力的星空里以光速奔流。

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

Bill Maher and Coleman Hughes finish each other's sentences for 3 minutes straight as they lay out how teachers' unions wrecked public education.

The MS NOW host thought she could sit this one out quietly. Then Maher turned and lobbed a grenade right at her.

MAHER: "The reason why they don't know that socialism didn't work... is because NOBODY taught them in school."

HUGHES: "A lot of kids go to underperforming public schools, which is our euphemism for government-funded daycare centers with occasional school-like activities."

MAHER: "I knew they weren't learning anything, but like you said, it's like a daycare center and not a good one."

HUGHES: "And I think people on the left want to blame funding because that's the easy issue. But the truth is, this school was well funded. You know, it's 50,000 per pupil at this school. The problem isn't the funding. It's that you can't fire anyone bad."

MAHER: "Yes.... The problem is the union, the teachers union, is too powerful. We've seen it in results in states where the union is less powerful, the schools do better."

HUGHES: "I call it the chalkboard mafia."

MAHER: "The problem, the unions protect bad schools and bad teachers, and the party protects the union. It's almost impossible in a lot of these cities to fire a teacher. I mean literally like you could sell drugs to a kid and it's got to be two offenses before we get—"

HUGHES: "It wasn't that long ago that the unions lobbied for a law in New York State to ban even collecting data that you would use to assess which teachers are better than others. You can't even get the data. So obviously the teachers union serves the teachers, they don't serve the students, and if you're a Democrat or any American that's serious about public school reform, you have to challenge the teachers union, period."

MAHER: "And I think in this school, where they were learning nothing with no supervision and absentee principals and teachers, I think spending 50,000 dollars per year per student, it's not money. That's what you always hear from the left. 'Oh, it's underfunded.' It's not the funding. The funding isn't the issue."

HUGHES: "No, it hasn't been for a very long time."

MAHER: "I think this is the kind of thing I will NEVER hear on MS NOW."

ALI VITALI: "I think you hear a lot of perspectives on MS NOW."

MAHER: "I don't ever hear that one."

CONTEXT: Maher and Hughes aren't making this up. On the latest Nation's Report Card, high school seniors posted the lowest reading and math scores ever recorded on the test.

And getting rid of bad teachers is nearly impossible. Federal survey data shows the average school district dismissed just 0.2 tenured teachers for poor performance in a year. That's roughly 1 in 500.

Meanwhile, students do better long-term in states where unions have less power.

A 2019 study in the American Economic Journal found that boys who went to school in states that forced districts to bargain with teachers' unions went on to earn about $2,100 LESS per year as adults compared to boys in states without those laws.

If a business failed this badly, someone would get fired. As Hughes put it: "The teachers union serves the teachers; they don't serve the students."

[(((RichardGCombs))) @rgcombs]

Outstanding. Read. Every. Word.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr @RobertKennedyJr]

Leftist mainstream media outlets piled on this week to express outrage at my observation, during a speech in Grand Rapids for Mike Rogers, about the troubling dearth of scientific output from the world’s 22 Arab nations over the past five decades. These reporters — @fatimathefatima @AP, @Kanishka183 @Reuters, @rachel_roubein @washingtonpost, @baylisswagner @nytimes, @stevebenen @MSNOWNews — omitted critical context, presumably to bestow plausibility on their accusations that my statements were racist and Islamophobic.

However, my speech was not a critique of Arabs or Islam, but of Islamism (also known as “Islamofascism” or “Political Islam”), a toxic ideology conceived and promoted by the terrorist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. Let’s see which reporters take the time to read this post and then correct their stories.

Criticizing Islamism is neither Islamophobic nor racist. Islamism is a violent corruption of mainstream Islam that summons adherents back to the seventh-century ideal of bloody jihad, the homicidal and suicidal religious zealotry that propelled a motley cadre of desert nomads to conquer half the world. Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar — the Muslim equivalent of the Vatican and the highest authority in Sunni Islamic thought — has rejected Islamism as “false Islam” and a “perversion of the Islamic religion” and accused it of “barbaric crimes.”

Islamism is intensely anti-American, anti-Western, and hostile to modernity. It is explicitly contemptuous of democracy, constitutional government, capitalism, minority rights, gay rights, women’s rights, free speech, and virtually all personal freedoms. Its central aspiration is for a global caliphate ruled by a single theocratic despot with absolute power to impose sharia law that dictates every aspect of human conduct. The Muslim Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, taught that the highest aspiration for a Muslim was martyrdom in the achievement of that goal; the purpose of every Islamic nation is to “perfect the industry of death” until world domination is accomplished.

I pointed out in my speech that the Muslim Brotherhood’s antipathy for modernity is a dramatic departure from Islam’s historical affinity for science and learning. During the Muslim Golden Age, spanning the eighth through the fifteenth centuries, Muslim leaders dignified Islam’s wealth and power by promoting a brilliant flowering of innovation and scholarship in science, mathematics, philosophy, art, literature, astronomy, pharmacology, psychology, engineering, architecture, medicine, and navigation that continues to enrich the world today. Arab leaders fostered an intellectual ferment unmatched by any other in human history. A long line of enlightened caliphs assembled—and abundantly rewarded—an unparalleled galaxy of jurists, scientists, physicians, philosophers, musicians, artists, poets, and wits. Muslim rulers elevated the role of reason and tolerance, cultivating a milieu of religious and intellectual freedom—where Jews and Christians also flourished—and encouraged sages of various faiths and ethnicities to collaborate and freely exchange ideas.

For five centuries, Arabic was the world’s most learned and literary tongue and the lingua franca of science and scholarship. Most mosques had libraries (Córdoba hosted 600!). Muslim princes in the tenth century often had more books in their personal collections than existed in all of Europe. Baghdad had 100 bookstores in AD 891. England would have to wait another 420 years until 1309 to see paper for the first time.

Islam’s second Golden Age during the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) birthed a cosmopolitan and pluralistic civilization centered in Constantinople that yielded additional bonanzas in poetry, music, art, and a tsunami of scientific innovation from coffee to water pumps, steam engines, gears, surgical scalpels and clamps, the first smallpox vaccine, and the cannons that allowed the Ottomans to dominate Europe to the gates of Vienna.

In 1928, six years after the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the Muslim Brotherhood began to spread its dark strain of violent fundamentalism from Egypt to Palestine and across the Muslim world. Islamism’s contagious proliferation ended the dialogue between Islam and the intellectual classes and demoted the role of reason in Islamic life. The Muslim Brotherhood’s principal philosopher, Sayyid Qutb, was contemptuous toward public education in science, math, and philosophy, believing that the only source of truth is the Koran. For Qutb, the purpose of education was not to celebrate life, or to nourish the intellect, but to indoctrinate children in the art of war, the glorification of death, and a blind obedience to an autocratic caliph.

Qutb railed against reason, which he considered the seed of apostasy. He sought to silence the humanities and viewed science as a sinister displacement of religion. He derided pluralism, rationalism, innovation, and tolerance. In doing so, he deprived Islam of its modern potential and its own greatest inheritance: the confidence to learn from the world, preserve its wisdom, and surpass it.

In his obituary for Muslim culture, The Closing of the Muslim Mind (2010), Robert R. Reilly recognizes that Qutb’s outlook dooms his followers to inertia. A religion that values obedience over initiative, that seeks to obviate independent reason, is a religion of violence. Where there is no framework for rational mediation, all disputes must be settled by force.

It didn’t worry Qutb that discouraging education in physics, mathematics, medicine, or engineering would atrophy intellectual and economic development in the Muslim world. Qutb explained that Muslim countries were so far behind the West in the sciences and technology that there was no hope to catch up. Muslims, he preached, should do what they do best—study the Koran and embrace martyrdom as the path for achieving global dominion: “The Muslim community today is neither capable of nor required to present before mankind great genius in material inventions, which would make the world bow its head before its supremacy.”

Qutb’s diatribe against Muslims competing in science and technology was nothing less than civilizational malpractice—especially given that he wrote it in 1964. Had Japan, Singapore, or South Korea accepted Qutb’s logic in 1964, they would have opted out of modernity. Instead, they chose to accept the challenge of competition. Their decision to engage has yielded stunning achievements that transformed their nations into economic and technological superpowers and enriched all of humanity.

The anti-intellectualism of Islamism—the rejection of evidence and the scientific method, the hostility toward objectivity, the suppression of contrary information, the deification of dogma, the embrace of pseudoscience, the contempt for reason as the path for discerning objective truth, and Islamism’s association of science with immorality—has helped close off the Islamic mind. The staggering metrics of intellectual and scholastic enfeeblement in Muslim nations attest to Islamism’s systematic squandering of human capital including the creative potential among the world’s two billion Muslims.

Korea issued 260,000 patents in 2024, while nine Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, issued fewer than 10,000 in total, with 8,000 of these coming from a single nation—Saudi Arabia—which has made herculean efforts in recent years to de-Islamize its society. Japan, which represents about 1.5% of the world’s population and is practically devoid of natural resources, granted 306,855 patents in 2024 alone. There are 127 million Japanese, compared to 500 million Arabs.

According to Hillel Ofek’s 2011 analysis, there were a mere nine scientists, engineers, and technicians per thousand citizens in Islamic nations. The global average was forty-one. Among the 1,800 universities in Muslim nations, only 312 housed scholars who had published articles in journals.

Muslims represent 26% of the world’s population, and Muslim countries control half the world’s crude oil resources and 40% of natural gas resources. And yet the 53 Muslim countries combined publish only 5% of the world’s scientific literature. Hillel Ofek points to a 1989 study showing that in a single year, the United States published 10,481 frequently cited scientific papers, but during that same year, Arab countries published just four. A 2002 analysis of Arab science in Nature magazine identified only three scientific areas of excellence from Islamic countries: desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction. According to Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg in 2011, “for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading.”

Contrast the Arabs’ dismal record of intellectual achievement in modern times with that of their closest cousins, the Jews, nearly all of whom live in democratic societies with laws that separate religion and politics.

Keep in mind that Jews, who number 15.8 million worldwide, represent a mere 0.2% of the world population. As of 2025, no Muslim has ever received the Nobel Prize in medicine or economics, and only four Muslim scientists—all living in Western democracies—have received the Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics. In contrast, some 200 Jews have received Nobel Prizes in science. About 26% of Nobel Prizes in math and science, 28% in medicine, 40% in economics, and 39% in chemistry have gone to Jews. Since 1901, some 22% of Nobel Prizes in all categories have gone to Jews.

Genocidal hatred against ALL Jews and Christians and other minorities is foundational to Islamism. Only in the West does Jew hatred pretend to require the alibi of Palestine or hide behind anti-Zionism. Muslim Brotherhood cosmology describes the universe as a cosmic, existential war between Islam and Jews that began with Muhammad and which only one side can survive. “Since Islam subdued them [in Medina],” Qutb warned, “they are unforgiving and fight furiously through conspiracies, intrigues, and also through proxies [the United States] who act in the darkness against all what Islam incorporates.” Islamist utopia will only emerge when every Jew is exterminated. Jews in Qutb’s theology are not just political adversaries, but perpetual and metaphysical evil. “The Jews,” he said, “are behind materialism, animal sexuality, the destruction of family, and the desolation of society.”

And Jewish genocide, for Islamism, is more than a theoretical aspiration. In 1948, the world’s 22 Arab nations were host to 750,000 Jews living in communities that predated Muhammad by 1,000 years. Today, there are virtually no Jews in those nations: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, Jordan, Gaza, or the PA-governed areas of the West Bank; in Nazi terminology, they are Judenrein: Jew-free. There are fewer than 1,000 Jews in Tunisia, down from 105,000. In 1948, Christian populations represented 20% of those nations; today they represent 4%. These are the real ongoing genocides of the Mideast.

Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime bonded with early Islamists over their shared Jew hatred. The Nazis became the principal funder of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s, and the Muslim Brotherhood operated propaganda, espionage, and sabotage operations for the Nazis during World War II. Joseph Goebbels and an army of Nazi and ex-Nazi propagandists built the Muslim Brotherhood’s powerful propaganda machine in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. The massive influx of money from Iran and the Gulf States starting in the 1990s turned this operation into an amplifier of unmatched power that makes Goebbels look like a piker. A global propaganda barrage by this outfit has distracted Hamas’s Western dupes from Islamism’s authentic genocides by persuading them that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza, even though, according to the CIA Factbook, Gaza’s population has actually increased since October 7, 2023.

Islamism is genocidal against Christians and Jews, but among its most pitiful victims are the Arab societies that suffer the misfortune of living under its rule. Despite all their petroleum wealth, Muslim countries have slipped behind Asia and Latin America in virtually every metric of political freedom, technological progress, and social well-being. Islamism’s merger of politics and religion has robbed Islam of its intellectual vigor and doomed most Muslim populations to living in stifling tyrannies with little freedom to elucidate their thoughts and speech or fulfill their creative potential. Those countries are predictably stagnant, unable to evolve in the modern world. The dark shadow of fundamentalism over scholarship and progress has proven toxic to the Muslims’ transition to modernity. The very civilization that practiced tolerance and celebrated pluralism and dialogue, filled a thousand libraries with its books, gave the world observatories and universities, and stunning innovations in science, has become closed, aggrieved, and violent, and averse to reason, curiosity, freedom of inquiry, and scholarship.

All 22 Arab nations in the Mideast and North Africa are autocratic dictatorships. Almost all are apartheid states that legally restrict the rights of minorities. Gays in many of the nations are put to death. Under sharia law, women have little more rights than cattle. They live stunted lives behind veiled faces, enduring systematic servitude, legalized domestic violence, child marriage, chattel slavery, and public stoning for adultery, which is legal for their husbands. In September 2021, the Taliban made it illegal for girls to attend school after age 12. The Taliban’s Vice and Virtue law forbids women from speaking aloud in public.

If you want to understand the Muslim Brotherhood’s vision for society, look no further than Gaza. Hamas, which rules Gaza, is the Palestine branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Palestinians have received over 4X per capita in international aid than Europeans received under the Marshall Plan. (See Clawson 2002.) Europe used its money to rebuild 17 nations. Palestinians couldn’t build themselves even one. Under Hamas’s iron fist, Gaza squandered its share on bombs, weapons, extravagant salaries for its billionaire kingpins, and a billion-dollar bunker and tunnel system built for its warriors—but off-limits to its citizens. Gaza remains a stunted and stagnant, impoverished society under tyrannical oppression, with no free speech or other basic freedoms. Hamas governs through force, including brutal crackdowns on discourse, public executions of dissenters and collaborators, tight controls on humanitarian aid distribution, and onerous taxes on almost every activity. No elections have occurred since Hamas took over in 2007. Instead of building a nation, Hamas has transformed Gaza into a death cult wallowing in victimhood, nursing aggrievements, addicted to violence, resentments, and yearning for a seventh-century miasma. Hamas nurses Palestinian infants from birth on genocidal hatred of ALL Jews—not just Zionists—and indoctrinates children in the savagery and unspeakable barbarism that the world witnessed on October 7. Hamas shows its contempt for the Palestinian people by deploying them as child soldiers and civilian shields, and placing rocket launchers and ammo dumps in schools and hospitals. Hamas’s greatest strengths are its propaganda operation and its willingness to impose unlimited pain on its own population to achieve its ideological goals.

Islamist governments like Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah distract their populations from their misery by blaming the myriad social ills and the predictable government failures on scapegoats: Jews, Zionists, and America. They’ll have us believe that all their derelictions are the result of the evil Zionists, the “Little Satan” Israel, and the “Great Satan,” the U.S. And just as victimhood is paralyzing to personal growth, it deprives Islamist nations of national success by robbing its practitioners of agency. Islamism’s cult of victimhood and its coterminous abolition of self-criticism have stagnated global Islam and locked it in hatred, violence, brooding resentment, and isolationism. Referring to the Arab world, Fouad Ajami described this as “a political tradition of belligerent self-pity.”

Contrast Gaza’s failures with the successes of its closest neighbor, Israel, a tiny sliver of swamp and desert 1/600th the size of its Arab neighbors, that blossomed into an agricultural juggernaut and a global economic and technological superpower. Jews took one of the few places in the Mideast with no oil, gas, or other resources, and despite being surrounded by enemies, they nevertheless turned the barren landscape into a vibrant, pluralistic democracy where Jews and Arabs vote as they please; worship according to their convictions; serve beside each other in the judiciary, the army, and political leadership; and enjoy equal rights. Women and gays in Israel have all the rights of men, and Israel’s biggest annual celebration is the Pride parade in Tel Aviv. As the only democracy in the Mideast, Israel is a robust and heroic outpost for freedom and Western values.

And Israel is merely a nugget among the bounties bestowed by Jews on Western civilization. There is no ethnic or religious group that has contributed more than Jews to the welfare of humanity or to the advancement of liberal democracy. Jewish traditions of ethics and thinking have shaped Western civilization and global progress through foundational moral concepts, including our monotheistic Christian belief system with its roots in Judaism, milestone scientific breakthroughs, medical innovation, and innumerable cultural achievements in art, literature, education, health, and entertainment. Relative to their proportion of the population, the astonishing contributions by Jews have been breathtaking. An abbreviated list would include medical advances like the polio vaccine (Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin), chemotherapy and immunology (Paul Ehrlich), streptomycin and the age of antibiotics (Selman Waksman), penicillin (Ernest Chain), pacemakers (Paul Zoll), and blood typing (Karl Landsteiner).

In sciences, a short list of Jewish luminaries would include Albert Einstein (theory of relativity), Niels Bohr (quantum mechanics), and Paul Berg (first recombinant DNA molecule).

Jewish contributions to business and technology include Google (Sergey Brin), Meta (Mark Zuckerberg), Oracle (Larry Ellison), Salesforce (Marc Benioff), Intel (Andrew Grove), and Dell Technologies (Michael Dell).

Jews virtually created the American entertainment industry, including founding six of the eight major Hollywood studios responsible for 75% of the classic Golden Age movies. They also revolutionized laughter. A 1978 TIME magazine survey found that 80% of professional comedians were Jewish.

The major figures of twentieth-century Western thought—Jesus Christ, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Karl Marx—were all Jewish. Twenty percent of philanthropic giving in the United States comes from Jews. Jews compose twenty-five percent of America’s most generous givers. They are overrepresented on lists of secular organizations that benefit human rights, social security, higher education, personal freedom, and constitutional rights. They represent 14% of doctors and 29% of psychiatrists. Their contributions to America’s global economic leadership include Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Blackstone, Wells Fargo, and Vanguard. In a rational universe, wouldn’t non-Jews be expected to celebrate these contributions with gratitude?

Now, here are some things that Jews don’t do: suicide bombings, rape gangs, beheading people, killing gay people, aspiring to kill all non-Muslims, forcing young girls to wed older men, lynching women for wearing makeup or showing hair, female mutilation, religious dictatorship, Christian genocide, polygamy, rioting and burning down cities, applying the death penalty for leaving Islam, cooking babies in ovens, hijacking airliners (and driving them into buildings), bombing buses and crowded restaurants, disfiguring girls with acid for failing to wear the hijab, operating modern slave markets where hereditary Black slaves are bought and sold by Arabs, advocating global jihad, and committing 90% of the terrorist acts globally.

These are the gifts that Islamism has bestowed on the world, along with closed minds, poverty, starvation, ignorance, oppression, and violence. This comparison begs the question, “Why does the world hate Jews and embrace Islamists?

The answer, of course, is a sophisticated mass propaganda campaign that ignores evidence and inverts reality to make Israel a global villain.

Looking at Islamism’s track record, seven nations with substantial Muslim populations—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, Syria, and Russia—have outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, branding it as a terrorist organization. Kenya and Argentina have also banned the Brotherhood for fear of its impacts on their societies. The Brotherhood today sees its best opportunities for expansion as Western nations that are unequipped to deal with its tactics.

In 2004, the FBI discovered the U.S. Brotherhood’s archives in a Virginia basement, including a 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum” characterizing the Brotherhood’s work in America as “a kind of gradual Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” Muslim Brotherhood documents describe this process of gradual infiltration as “gradualism,” “entryism,” or “Da’awa.”

In a 1995 speech in Toledo, Ohio, the Brotherhood’s leading cleric, Yusuf al-Waradawi, told his audience: “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through sword but through Da’awa.” As a board member and outreach chair of a Muslim Brotherhood front group, Abdul El-Sayed ran a high-school recruitment program entitled “How to do effective Da’awa.”

The Muslim Brotherhood’s explicit written strategy for taking over Western nations is to broaden its appeal through a “red–green alliance” by adopting Leftist rhetoric and allying itself with liberals, socialists, and communists. This was the strategy first initiated by Yasser Arafat in the 1960s and then implemented by Muslim Brotherhood acolyte Ayatollah Khomeini during his 1979 Iranian Revolution, and later by Muslim Brother Mohammed Morsi during his 2011 color revolution in Egypt. After they gained power, the Leftists, in each case, learned that they were not actually Islamism’s partners, but only its useful idiots. Khomeini hunted down, jailed, and murdered his former Leftist and communist allies. Morsi sidelined his. A 2012 Arabic-language statement bearing Abdul Al-Sayed’s name backed Morsi’s presidency and urged him to “purge” the media and police.

Anyone wondering what America’s future looks like if the Muslim Brotherhood gets its way has only to look at France, where Islamist mobs of the red–green alliance, following the Muslim Brotherhood playbook, chant communist phrases, wave Palestinian flags, and vent their destructive hostility toward the West by destroying the iconic monuments of our shared civilizations.

Abdul El-Sayed mocks his critics as Islamophobic or anti-Arab racists when they inquire about his continued loyalties to the Muslim Brotherhood. But El-Sayed and his family have long and deep entanglements with the terrorist organization. A 20,000-word investigation by The Project for the Investigation of Terrorism documents El-Sayed's two decades of intensive affiliations with the Muslim Brotherhood, and nearly every one of its legacy front groups that the Brotherhood set up in the U.S. to Islamify and destroy our democracy. That same organization recorded dozens of instances in recent years where Abdul El-Sayed has either directly lied about his relationship or refused to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood.

On Oct. 1, an Ohio voter became the latest to ask Al-Sayed to disavow the Brotherhood. Under persistent badgering before national news cameras, Al-Sayed finally caved: “Sure. Yeah, absolutely!” he said unconvincingly. He then spent five minutes attacking the man’s motives.

El-Sayed said nothing about the Brotherhood itself, its ideology, or the Muslim Brotherhood front organizations he works with. A disavowal that names nothing and condemns nothing is a disavowal in name only.

Why can’t El-Sayed give us a full-throated and detailed condemnation of this terror group, and disavow also its poisonous ideology without ambiguity? Why can’t he acknowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood is a despicable terror organization, and that Islamism and sharia law are anathema to American values? Americans shouldn’t have to worry whether a U.S. Senate candidate has loyalty to an ideology that openly hates our country and has vowed to destroy it.

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

We're in a new era of communication, and only one side seems to be living in it. The old guard consultant class is about to be relegated to the dustbin of history.

If you think that high prices lost the election for the right, you don't understand marketing. Humans have no problem paying a premium for a good quality brand. Notice the word "brand", not "product". Are Nikes better than New Balance? Nope. But the brand is better. And notice what happened when they tinkered with the brand and screwed their core narrative? Nike stock fell through the basement. Did the product change? Nope. The brand did.

It's not the product, it's the brand. Results don't sell the product, the storytelling does. Will these newly-elected commies lower prices? Of course not. Are they gonna get you free healthcare? No, your insurance is gonna get even worse, just like it did the last time they tried socialized medicine. They're not going to do anything they've sold you, but...like Saul Goodman said: if you're committed enough, you can make any story work.

The committed storytelling of a couple insane podcasters was enough to fracture an entire political coalition from their own side in less than 2 years...they have zero power, zero credibility, they've never actually governed anything nor produced any results, but...they're good storytellers, and that's all that matters. Are they telling a good story? No, it's atrocious, but they're telling their atrocious story effectively and compellingly.

It is 100% true that everything's too damn expensive, and we all know that inflated prices are always sticky. Does anyone know that it's entirely the result of shutting down the global economy over the flu and (both naive republicans and democrats) printing infinity dollars for several years? Nope...because nobody has effectively told that story, and it's an unsexy story to tell. "Free stuff!" is a VERY easy story to tell, and when everyone's gotta take out a second mortgage just to pay their insurance premiums, "free healthcare" is an unbeatable story. It doesn't matter that "free healthcare" doesn't exist and socialized medicine is a terrible product...it's not the product, it's the brand. And "FREE!" is a great brand.

You can't get mad at people for having the financial literacy of a 9 year old. I mean, you can, but they outnumber you a million to one, so it's not going to be productive. You need to figure out how to make an unsexy story sexy, or else the "free stuff!" crowd is going to eat your lunch every time. If you give people a choice between earning a six pack on a treadmill or taking Ozempic, they're gonna choose Ozempic...they don't care about the side effects. If you give people a choice between fiscal discipline or free stuff...guess what they'll pick? They don't care about the side effects.

With projected growth of 5%, the economy right now is stronger than it's been in generations. Is that the story you hear? Nope. Is that the vibe you feel? Absolutely not, especially when every time you fill up your gas tank, it feels like a diesel enema.

It's not the product, it's the brand. A great product can fall into oblivion with bad messaging...a single bad review from one effective storyteller can tank a restaurant. The "influencer economy" is lucrative for a reason; everybody inherently understands the importance of effective storytelling...except the right. Zohran Mamdani gets it...he has an army of influencers on staff. In a perfect metaphor of this transitional phase of old guard vs new wave political messaging, Zohran nuked the Vice President into oblivion with maybe the biggest ratio in the history of the internet. By simply posting the subway assistant meme, Mamdani got 2 MILLION likes, quoting a post from the VP that had only 10K likes. If you're reading that sentence thinking "this is fucking ridiculous, you're talking about social media likes as political analysis now?"...you are the problem.

Yes, this stuff matters. Rizz matters. The President did a masterful job of this kind of retail politics in his historic 2024 campaign...you can be angry that this is what politics has been reduced to, but you can either adapt or die.

"No the problem is, you didn't deliver enough for the American people!" Are you a moron? Since when does anybody care about that? What have democrats delivered for Californians in the last 20 years? Unmitigated wildfires, homeless drug zombies everywhere, roads that look like Fallujah in 2004...people don't care about results. They think they care about results. That want you to believe they care about results, just as Nike wants you to believe their shoes are better than New Balance...but at the end of the day, all people really care about is the swoosh.

Adapt or die.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Americans, read this to the end. Then share it. Because if you don't understand what I'm about to tell you, you will lose your country the same way we lost ours.

You need to kill the EU. Not reform it. Not negotiate with it. Kill it as a political project. If you want to save Western civilization, there is no other way.

I know how that sounds. Let me show you why I'm not exaggerating.

Over the past few years, Brussels has built a complete architecture of control. The Digital Services Act to decide what you're allowed to say. Chat Control to read your private messages, including encrypted ones. A digital ID to end anonymity. A digital euro and a war on cash to see every transaction you make. Speech, private messages, identity, money. All four pillars of total control, built in plain sight, each brick sold as "safety."

But the laws are not the real danger. The real danger is the machine that produces them. And the one thing you need to understand about that machine is this:

It never stops.

In 2005, France and the Netherlands voted NO to the European Constitution. A clear, democratic no. Two years later, Brussels repackaged almost the entire text as the Treaty of Lisbon and passed it without asking the French people again. In 2008, Ireland voted NO to Lisbon. So they made Ireland vote again the next year, until it said yes.

Chat Control was rejected by the European Parliament. It came back. Rejected again. Came back again. Every new presidency, a new version, a new name, the same goal.

They don't win the argument. They outlast you. You have to win every time. They only have to win once. And once a power is transferred to Brussels, it never comes back.

Now here's what should keep you up at night. That same machine doesn't stop at Europe's borders. It will come for your institutions too. Not with an invasion. Step by step. Like a hacker probing a system for weak points.

First, through your companies. Brussels doesn't regulate European platforms. It regulates X, Meta, Google, Apple. It's cheaper to apply one set of rules worldwide than two, so the censorship machine built for Europe ends up running on your phone in Texas. That's how GDPR cookie banners ended up all over American websites.

Second, through NGOs. The DSA gives special status to "trusted flaggers," organizations whose takedown requests platforms must prioritize. When your State Department barred the architect of the DSA from the United States, it also barred people from organizations campaigning against "online hate" and "disinformation," some of them operating on both sides of the Atlantic. The network is already inside your house.

Third, through experts and academia. A whole industry of "disinformation research" produces the reports, the definitions, and the lists that regulators then turn into law. Same vocabulary in Brussels, London, Ottawa, Canberra and Washington. That's not a coincidence. That's a pipeline.

Fourth, through international agreements. Every summit, every treaty, every "global standard" on online safety or digital governance is another lever to make American rules converge with European ones. Quietly. Technically. Without a single vote of the American people.

Fifth, through patience. They are waiting for the next administration that agrees with them. One election. That's all it takes for every safeguard you built to be dismantled from the inside, with European legislation ready to copy and paste and a press kit that says "our democratic allies already do this."

You blocked them once. They will try again. And again. And again. With new names, new causes, new crises. It will never stop. Not as long as the machine exists.

That's why half measures won't work. You can't fine a cancer into remission. You can't negotiate with it. You remove it, or it spreads.

The EU started as a free trade area between sovereign nations. That Europe, I'd defend. What it has become is a supranational bureaucracy that no one elected, no one can fire, and no people can vote out. A machine designed to transfer power upward and never give it back.

So use everything you have. Stop treating Brussels as a legitimate rule-maker for American companies. Refuse any trade deal that accepts foreign censorship of American platforms. Deal with Europe nation by nation, not through Brussels. Make it clear that the price of exporting censorship to America is too high to pay.

America is the last great country with free speech written into its founding document as an absolute. If America holds, Europeans have something to point to, something to fight for, somewhere to look. If America falls, there is nowhere left.

Western civilization was built on free people saying what they think, owning what they build, and governing themselves. The EU, in its current form, is the negation of all three.

Kill the project. Everywhere. Or one day, it will have you too.

I'm writing this from France. I love Europe. That's exactly why I'm asking for your help.

[(((RichardGCombs))) @rgcombs]

Indeed.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

An entire sermon designed to impose unearned guilt on others while presenting the use of government force to take their property as compassion.

You don't become virtuous by volunteering someone else's money, and you don't acquire moral superiority by demanding sacrifices you have no intention of making yourself.

Compassion is something you practice, not something you impose at gunpoint.

Calling coercion kindness and theft generosity doesn't make you the good guys. It makes you self-righteous authoritarians.

[Daniel Greenfield - "Hang Together or Separately" @Sultanknish]

incredible that anyone ever fell for the 'settler violence' narrative put out by local Antifa and Islamists who staged attacks on Jewish farmers and then broadcast edited footage