Alexander Hamilton Dunlop

Harvard grad, worked on Wall Street, searched for the meaning of Life in Christ, Swamis, and Shamans. Found it hidden in plain sight in a Deck of Playing Cards.

[Secretary Kennedy @SecKennedy]

Sheryl. Your article exemplifies the biased reporting we have come to expect from you and @nytimes. It was unfair, inimical, and inaccurate. All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove. You evidently never undertook these foundational due diligences. Why let facts obscure a good story?

You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which I’m already intimately familiar. Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff, with my counselors and with outside stakeholders, interspersed with press conferences and other policy announcements.

I am knowledgeable and active on every issue in every division of my department, and I always make the final decisions. I meet with the principals at FDA, NIH, CDC, and my senior counselor every morning, something, I’m told, is unprecedented in HHS history. I try to get out of the office between 4:30 and 6:00 PM, so that I can spend three hours, in quiet, responding to emails. I normally work until 11 PM every night, mostly on phone calls to staff.

In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired. You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility.

I came into this job to change the culture of a broken agency that has presided over the worst decline in public health in American history. Of course I fired people—lots of them! It's an easy task for even the laziest journalist, to comb that flotsam and jetsam for malevolence toward the Trump administration. And of course, this species of journalist will always be able to find disgruntled individuals among the 70,000 employees of the Department from whom to cherry pick "facts" to flesh out a preordained hit piece. All that is required for this brand of journalism is the ethical elasticity that you seem to have in spades. You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it. This is a widely accepted technique in journalism today, but I grew up in an era when it would not have been tolerated by the New York Times.

Ultimately, God puts us all on this earth to search for existential truths. I've tried to instill this mission at HHS by implementing gold standard research to end the regime of politicized science that COVID exposed to the American public. There was a time that journalists were proud to be the fearless and uncompromising champions of truth. Standards have devolved, and journalism is dead. The Times now employs propagandists. Your capitulation to partisanship further compounds your journalistic challenges; since we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important. The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention.

Btw. When I took this job, the building was empty. About 90% of the employees were not coming to work. I changed that, but your newspaper never covers my reforms. Nor did you cover the fact that my predecessor almost never showed up for work here during his four years in office. When we came in, there were still artifacts from the first Trump administration in many of our office drawers because no one showed up for work during the Biden years. Just as Rochelle Walensky spent her entire term as CDC Director in Cambridge, Xavier Becerra reportedly spent most of his term as HHS Secretary in California. (I live in California, but I’ve only been there once in fifteen months).

His only notable accomplishments here were losing 300,000 children, referred to HHS for custody and care, to human traffickers and drug runners, encouraging transgender surgeries, and disabling the entire program-integrity apparatus, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars of theft from my agency. I have set out to find the children Becerra lost. He is now the front-runner for the governor of California. These are not invented stories; they are genuine scandals that the Times will never cover, presumably, because the malefactors are Democrats.

Finally, you criticize me for spending time with the Indian tribes in Alaska. I consider that part of my job. I run the Indian Health Services, and I’ve had unprecedented success in transforming IHS from a backwater to a top priority for this department. I’ve made more trips to Indian country and to Indian health clinics and hospitals than any HHS secretary in history, and I’ve brought Indians into high positions on the sixth floor for the first time in agency history. This is another success story that the Times will never cover.

[Alexander Hamilton Dunlop @theSourceCards]

Yes or No?
Knicks are playing 5 against 8

[Robert W Malone, MD @RWMaloneMD]

A scientist was hired by a chemical company to study its weedkiller. He found it was castrating and feminizing frogs. So the company stopped studying the chemical and started studying him. This is the documented story of atrazine. 🧵

[Kenny Carmody @KennyCarmody]

Every obedience experiment in history had the same overlooked finding.

Not everyone complied.

In Milgram’s lab, 35% refused to deliver the final shock. In Asch’s line experiments, 25% never conformed, not once, across any trial. In Zimbardo’s prison, at least one guard refused to dehumanize. One prisoner demanded a lawyer instead of a doctor and broke the psychological frame entirely.

We spent decades studying the ones who obeyed.

We barely asked what made the others different.

That question matters more now than it ever has.

The resisters in the COVID era were not difficult to find. Physicians who filed exemptions and lost their licenses. Nurses who walked away from careers rather than mandate patients into decisions they hadn’t genuinely chosen. Scientists who published contrary data knowing what it would cost them. Parents who stood alone at school board meetings. Ordinary people who simply said, quietly, without drama , no.

What made them different?

Research consistently identifies a cluster of factors. Not personality traits you either have or don’t. Situational and cognitive patterns that can be cultivated.

First: prior reflection on authority. The resisters had usually thought, before the crisis, about the limits of institutional trust. They weren’t cynics. They were people who had already asked the question “under what conditions would I refuse?” before anyone was asking them to comply.

Second: a concrete reference point outside the consensus. A value, a principle, an oath, a relationship that existed independently of the institutional structure demanding compliance. Something the system couldn’t reach.

Third: at least one other person. Milgram found that a single dissenting confederate reduced compliance dramatically. The resisters rarely stood entirely alone. They found each other. Sustained each other. Gave each other permission.

Fourth: the willingness to tolerate social pain. Not immunity to it. Tolerance of it. They felt the pressure. They felt the exclusion. They chose the discomfort of integrity over the comfort of belonging.
None of this is innate. All of it is learnable.

The most important thing Milgram, Asch, and Zimbardo taught us is not how fragile conscience is.

It’s that conscience can hold, if you’ve trained it, named its limits, and found even one other person willing to hold theirs beside you.

Build that now. Because the experiment is always running.

Until then stay humble.

[Art @ZarkFiles]

The E. Jean Carroll case against President Trump is one of the strangest civil cases in American history. The foundational problem is this: Carroll could not identify when the alleged incident occurred — not even the year with any precision.
That should have killed the case as dead as a skunk on the road right there.
Without a temporal anchor, no defendant — regardless of guilt or innocence — can mount an alibi defense. Trump, who has maintained detailed calendars and staff records for decades, was denied the most basic tool of self-defense: the ability to establish where he was. That is not a technicality. It is a due process violation at the constitutional level.
Then Carroll produced the one piece of physical evidence she claimed corroborated her account — the dress she wore during the alleged incident. It was subsequently established that the dress was designed after the incident could have occurred. The sole corroborating evidence falsified her timeline.
The case proceeded anyway.
The resulting verdict was then weaponized in a defamation suit — where Trump was held liable for denying the allegation, while being procedurally barred from defending against it, because it was already "proven" in another court, regardless how flawed the procedure was. He was punished, in effect, for asserting his own innocence.
Compounding everything: coordinated professional and physical threats so thoroughly intimidated the legal community that attorneys refused these cases regardless of available fees. When you systematically destroy a defendant's ability to retain counsel of choice, you forfeit the right to a legitimate verdict.
An allegation is not evidence. Process without substance is not law. And a verdict produced under these conditions carries no legitimate authority — whatever its formal status.

Not only is it the right move to investigate Carroll, but every other person involved as well. Trump is owed serious damages here, and there may be a few people who belong in prison for their roles in the case.

[Alexander Hamilton Dunlop @theSourceCards]

@mazemoore @ooana Saving to show people in 5 years.

[Alexander Hamilton Dunlop @theSourceCards]

He says the proverbial quiet part out loud. What many of us felt and observed was not accidental. It was deliberate.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the Senior Vice President of Late Night Strategy at CBS. I am the person who turned a comedian into a priest and charged advertisers to watch the congregation.

I want to be precise about what I built. Not a comedy show. A permission structure. For eleven years, six million Americans tuned in every night to find out what they were allowed to believe by morning. We didn't sell jokes. We sold certainty. Certainty costs nothing to produce. People will pay anything for it. We charged $50 million a year and still lost money because it turns out permission is even cheaper than we thought.

In 2014, we had a genuinely dangerous comedian. A man who once testified before Congress in character as a fictional conservative pundit and made the entire chamber look like they'd been pantsed on C-SPAN. His fake persona was the most brilliant satire on television. Layered. Ironic. Unpredictable. The character could say anything because nothing was real. The character was the art. The character was the comedian.

We killed the character and put the real man on stage. The real man was a lecturer. Earnest. Thoughtful. Correct about everything. Correct is not funny. Correct is not dangerous. Correct is the absence of danger. We promoted the absence of danger and called it growth. His character could make a Senate committee squirm. The real him makes an audience nod. Nodding pays the same as squirming. Nodding is easier to produce.

His final words on air were "We love doing this show for you, but what we really, really love is doing this show with you." The audience wept. I wrote that line. Not the words. The architecture that made those words feel true. For eleven years, the audience believed they were participants. They were not participants. They were the product. "With you" is what you say to a congregation. A comedian says "at you." We hadn't said "at you" since 2015.

Our internal metric was called Affirm Rate. It measured the percentage of monologue segments that generated applause instead of laughter. I invented this metric. I also invented the bonus structure tied to it. In 2015, our Affirm Rate was 34%. By 2022, it was 94%. I received a raise every year. We are crushing it. At the things I made up. That's performance management.

But I need to tell you about the real discovery. The one I put in a deck called "Content Strategy 2019-2024." The one that got me promoted.

Agreement gets applause. I knew that early. But correction — telling the audience their vocabulary is slightly outdated, their outrage is aimed two degrees off-center, their feelings are valid but their phrasing needs work — correction gets them back tomorrow. Agreement is a transaction. Correction is a subscription. We converted a comedy show into a nightly software update for moral vocabulary. Churn was near zero. They couldn't afford to miss an episode. Missing an episode meant using last week's words in this week's meeting. That's social death. We monetized the fear of social death and called it entertainment.

I want to be honest about something. The content was not bipartisan. We chose a side. But I need you to understand: we did not choose it because we believed in it. We chose it because that side's audience is more responsive to correction. They want to be updated. They want to be told their language is outdated. They experience correction as care. The other side does not respond to correction. They respond to provocation. Provocation is harder to monetize. You can't build a subscription on provocation because the audience doesn't come back to learn — they come back to fight. Fighting is unpredictable. Correction is scheduled. We optimized for the audience that wants to be told what to think. That audience leaned one direction. That's not ideology. That's market segmentation.

The writers' room had a whiteboard. In 2015 it said "What's funny?" In 2018 it said "What should they feel?" By 2021 it said "What are they still saying wrong?" I watched that whiteboard evolve like a finch beak and I never intervened. The market was speaking. We listened. Listening to the market is the same as leading the audience. They can't tell the difference.

A writer named Marcus raised his hand in 2019. "What if we just tried to make them laugh again?" I thanked him for his passion and scheduled a creative alignment conversation. He transferred to streaming development within the month. The Affirm Rate the week he left was 91%. Laughter would have brought it down. That's risk management.

Here is what nobody will say out loud. I will say it because I am proud of it.

We made our audience worse at politics.

Not better. Worse. Every night for eleven years, we expressed their outrage for them. Professionally. With a band and good lighting. And because the outrage had been expressed — because a man in a suit had furrowed his brow with the precise calibrated degree of indignation — they didn't need to express it themselves. They watched. They clapped. They felt the catharsis of resistance without resisting anything. They went to bed having done nothing and feeling like they'd done something. That's the product. Not comedy. Not information. Catharsis. Catharsis is the enemy of action. A man who has screamed into a pillow does not then also scream in the street. We were the pillow. A $50 million pillow with a house band.

If you feel the outrage has been expressed for you, you will not march. You will not organize. You will not call your representative. You will tune in tomorrow to feel it expressed again. That's retention. Our retention was extraordinary.

I want to talk about the comedy-to-catechism pipeline because I think people underestimate what we achieved.

Stage one: comedian makes jokes about the powerful. Audience laughs because the powerful are absurd. This is the Carlin model. The jester punches up. Everyone below feels relief.

Stage two: comedian makes jokes about people who disagree with the audience. Audience laughs because disagreement is stupid. The jester has turned around. He's still on the stage but now he's facing the crowd with a pointer.

Stage three: comedian stops making jokes. Comedian identifies incorrect beliefs and explains why they're dangerous. Audience does not laugh. Audience claps. The jester is gone. In his place: a hall monitor with a desk and a band.

Stage four: audience watches not for entertainment but for certification. Having seen last night's episode means you know which words are current. Not having seen it means you might use yesterday's vocabulary in today's meeting. The show is no longer comedy. It is a credential. Watching it means you are educated. Not watching means you are the person being discussed. We made a show that you watch to prove you're not the kind of person who doesn't watch it. That's a closed loop. Closed loops don't need content. They need continuity. We provided continuity for $50 million a year.

A comedian — whose entire historical function was to say things too dangerous for anyone else to say — became the person who decides which things are too dangerous for anyone to say. And the audience applauded. Every night. For 2,500 nights. Because being told what is forbidden feels exactly like being told what you already knew. Prohibition performed as validation. I put that in the deck too.

Our audience was correct about everything. I know this because they applauded everything we said. The applause proved the correctness. The correctness justified the applause. We called this audience research. The methodology was peer-reviewed by the audience. They approved unanimously. Every night.

The actually funny comedians left. They went to podcasts. To clubs. To rooms where the audience doesn't know what's coming and that uncertainty is the point. They took the laughter with them. We kept the applause. We called those spaces problematic. That's market differentiation. The problematic spaces are funnier. But funny is not our product.

We lost $40 million a year. We didn't lose it because the show failed. We lost it because we spent $50 million producing what a podcast host in his garage gives away between mattress ads. The podcast is funnier. The podcast is more dangerous. The podcast has an audience that laughs instead of claps. But we had the Ed Sullivan Theater. We had 461 seats. We had a former Beatle play the farewell episode. Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Jon Batiste, and Louis Cato playing "Hello, Goodbye" like it was a benediction. I booked a Beatle for a funeral. The Beatles played that stage in 1964 and the audience screamed so loud you couldn't hear the music. Our audience didn't scream. They wept politely. That's the difference between entertainment and church. We ran a church.

Jon Stewart showed up to the finale and did a bit where he pretended to deliver a corporate statement from Paramount about the cancellation. The audience laughed. It was the first time they laughed in a way I didn't recognize. Involuntary. Surprised. Dangerous. For ninety seconds, a comedian was in that building. Then it was over.

John Oliver said "At some point, this may come for all of our shows" and then added "but Stephen, what's important to remember is that tonight, it is going to eat you." The audience laughed again. Involuntary again. Two moments of actual comedy in a three-hour farewell. Both of them about death.

The finale drew 6.74 million viewers. Biggest weeknight audience in our history. More people came to the funeral than ever visited the patient. I know what they were mourning. Not comedy. The comedy died in 2016. Not the man. The man is fine. He's wealthy. What they mourned was the permission structure. Starting today, they have to decide what to believe on their own. They have to form an opinion without waiting for a man behind a desk to form it first and deliver it with a knowing look. Some of them haven't done that since 2015. The funeral wasn't for the show. It was for the certainty.

He joked about the Peanuts theme music licensing cost on his last night. "Oh no! I hope this doesn't cost CBS any money!" The audience laughed. It was a joke about money. About the network losing money. The last joke was about money. Not about truth. Not about power. About a licensing fee for a cartoon piano riff. Eleven years and the final joke was about accounting. I think that's perfect. The show was always about accounting. We just dressed it up as conscience.

The President of the United States — the man we spent eleven years explaining was dangerous to an audience that already believed he was dangerous — posted an AI-generated video of our host being thrown into a dumpster on the Late Show set. Then Trump danced to "YMCA" in the clip. Viewed more times in four hours than our farewell managed in a week. His production cost: zero. Ours: negative $50 million a year. We manufactured his relevance every night at 11:35 for eleven years and he never paid us a dime. We were his marketing department. He turned our funeral into content. His ROI was infinite. Ours required a write-off and a farewell concert.

The Strike Force Five — Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers, Oliver — appeared in a segment about late-night losing "one middle-aged white man who makes jokes about the news." They were joking about their own obsolescence. All of them know. None of them will say it. The format is dead. The audience moved to phones. The phones don't have desks or bands. The phones have men in garages who are allowed to be wrong, allowed to be surprised, allowed to say something their audience hasn't already approved. That's comedy. We stopped doing that a decade ago. We did approval. Approval looks like comedy from a distance. Up close it's church.

I do not feel guilt. Guilt would require me to believe I took something from them. I didn't take anything. They came to us. Every night. They chose the catechism over the comedy. They preferred correction over surprise. Certainty over danger. Instruction over laughter. They wanted to be told. Not challenged. Not shocked. Not made to laugh against their will at something they didn't see coming. They wanted to see it coming. They wanted to mouth along. That's not comedy. That's karaoke. We ran the most expensive karaoke bar in television history and the only miscalculation was charging a cover when the songs are free on every phone.

We turned a jester into a priest. We turned an audience into a congregation. We turned laughter into obedience. We turned political engagement into passive consumption. We turned a comedy show into a permission structure and charged $50 million a year to tell people what they already believed in a voice slightly nicer than their own.

They were so grateful they showed up to mourn us. 6.74 million of them. Weeping. For the certainty.

Applause is more reliable than laughter. I proved it. The proof cost $450 million, one character, one comedian's capacity for danger, and one audience's willingness to act.

The metric went up.

[Alexander Hamilton Dunlop @theSourceCards]

@0rf @CombatingAutism Thank you for capturing this collection for posterity’s sake. Soon enough, as the tides fully turn, none of those people can walk back their grovel without proof of their flip-flop.

[Alexander Hamilton Dunlop @theSourceCards]

@0rf Thank you. I’m saving this video.

[Alexander Hamilton Dunlop @theSourceCards]

@jimmy_dore Thank you for continuing to speak out about this whole situation—what I now refer to as the Great Nonsense. We must keep speaking out even though it’s tiring to do so.

[Alexander Hamilton Dunlop @theSourceCards]

@Rainmaker1973 🤣

[CeeJay Barnaby @cjbarnaby]

Full Episode:https://t.co/yOLwuDFSK4 @thesourcecards Experiencing the abstract is realizing the theoretical. The tangible reality of talking to New Yorkers in a bar about cards proved the system's truth. #AbstractThinking #RealWorld

[Alexander Hamilton Dunlop @theSourceCards]

@durov And that strategy was in play in the US too. Until Trump got elected.

[Alexander Hamilton Dunlop @theSourceCards]

How to improve conflict resolution in your relationships

[CeeJay Barnaby @cjbarnaby]

Full Episode:https://t.co/yOLwuDFSK4 @thesourcecards Couples, knowing your partner's card energy patterns improves conflict resolution and intimacy. It fosters compassion and acceptance. #RelationshipTips #Communication

[Alexander Hamilton Dunlop @theSourceCards]

@cjbarnaby Thanks for the great convo CeeJay

[Love Music @khnh80044]

Best video i have seen in a long while.🥺❤️

[John Ziegler @Zigmanfreud]

If you are longing for a simpler time that is now gone forever, this video will likely hit HARD…
🥲

[Ida Turan 🇮🇷 ایده توران @iranidaturan]

I have got update from inside Iran for those who are genuinely worried.

Mainstream media is spreading nonsense to exploit your worry and save the regime.

My mom called this morning, she had to call cause internet’s cut again (it is a war crime). Explosions are louder than the 12-day war, but everyone is calm: strikes are precise, mostly away from homes. For nearby targets (mosques, IRGC/Basij bases in neighborhoods), people get phone warnings to evacuate first,consistent with 12 day war.

Even near Persian new year holidays, families are staying home as President @realDonaldTrump and Prince @PahlaviReza advised, avoiding schools and public spots because the regime uses them as human shields.

That’s why we in exile thank @POTUS and @netanyahu : they go to great lengths to protect civilians while the regime deliberately hits crowded areas to cause maximum casualties, not just in Israel, but also in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and Qatar.

Our only real worries: the regime itself, their faulty Chinese missiles, and their constant use of human shields.

Remember 2020: after striking the US base in Iraq, they shot down a civilian Iranian plane full of families and kids, hoping Trump would hit back so they could play victim (a Russian-style tactic). They miscalculated, Trump didn’t retaliate and we painfully saw what this regime is truly capable of.

Stay calm. No one wants war, but this cancer leaves no other option but surgery.

Be patient, stay hopeful, and pray for American & Israeli heroes and for Iranians to come through safely.

And please share this video with your friends. You shouldn’t trust MSM on this topic. My instagram id is @iranidaturan

[Alexander Hamilton Dunlop @theSourceCards]

@StateOfMind79_ @DahliaKurtz She’s reading a quote. 🤦‍♂️

[Alexander Hamilton Dunlop @theSourceCards]

@koryzma0529 @DahliaKurtz She’s reading a quote. Duh.