Valerie Jones

[Flopping Aces @FloppingAces]

RFK Jr. sat on CNN and said something that should not have been controversial. He said the government’s first duty in any future pandemic is to protect constitutional rights. Not balance them against expert opinion. Not temporarily suspend them. Protect them.

Dana Bash reacted as if he had just committed a category error. She told him she did not want to “allow” him to say things that were not entirely true. Allow. That is the word she chose. Not “challenge.” Not “disagree.” Allow.

Watch that moment carefully and the entire posture becomes clear. This is not a journalist testing a claim. This is a gatekeeper deciding which premises are permitted on air. The substance of Kennedy’s argument ... that the last response got almost everything wrong ... barely registered. What registered was the unacceptable suggestion that rights might rank above the public-health machinery.

That is the scandal that never ended. A large part of the media and the expert class still treats constitutional rights as optional equipment that can be powered down whenever the right people declare an emergency. They do not say it in those words. They simply act as if the Bill of Rights is a set of guidelines that apply only when the experts find them convenient.

Bash’s performance was not an outlier. It was a clean demonstration of the surviving mindset. The lockdowns are over. The mandates are gone. The emergency declarations have expired. But the assumption that experts outrank rights never left the building. It just learned to speak more politely until someone like Kennedy forced the issue back into the open.

The Constitution was not written as a suggestion for calm weather. It was written to restrain power precisely when fear is highest and the people in charge are most certain they know better.
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[Clay Travis @ClayTravis]

Important announcement: I am upping my offer, $10 million dollars for a head-to-head basketball game between the defending WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces and a boy's high school state title team of my choice. If the Aces beat my team, I will give them $10 million.

[Glenn Beck @glennbeck]

Mamdani just set off a devastating domino effect with his new tax on the second homes of the wealthy in New York City. He's bragging about forcing those evil capitalists to pay their fair share so the City can fund more libraries. But has he ever actually done the MATH? And I mean real math, not socialist math. Because the rich homeowners will do the real math. And they'll LEAVE.

Socialist math ALWAYS leads to suffering for the very people it promised to lift up. Here's what Mamdani just set into motion:

First, high-end owners will just dump their properties. Why pay the tax when it's cheaper to rent a nice hotel? And they'll sell low because 1) NOBODY wants to pay that tax, so buyers will just factor it into the property's cost and offer less, and 2) the longer the sellers wait to sell, the more they're being taxed. So, selling low is cheaper. Because math.

That will drive down luxury property values citywide. Sounds great, right? Well... unless you're a developer. Let's say you've already gotten funding from the bank to build new housing, including that affordable housing the socialists love so much. But now, the expensive units at the top of the building won't sell for nearly as much as the bank was hoping for. So, they run the math and the project stops.

Now, all that's left is a giant hole. And all those people hired to build that building - hundreds of excavators, plumbers, electricians, and ironworkers - just lost their jobs, their hourly paychecks, and their pension credits for the year.

From there, it's more basic math - supply and demand. The supply doesn't get built, so the demand increases and the rent for other affordable units goes up. The policy sold as "pro-working class" just made their lives more expensive.

But at least the City will generate more taxes for the libraries, right? Nope. The rich will dump their second homes, so there goes that tax money. Nobody will want to buy that property as a second home, so maybe it will sell to someone living there full time. That's a win by Mamdani's math, but it also means nobody's paying that tax anymore. And also, all those people who just lost their jobs won't be paying taxes either. But hey, at least you stuck it to the capitalists!

That's socialism in a nutshell. Thanks, Mamdani.

[Valerie Jones @vj12]

@FreddyLA7 Have a wonderful time, @FreddyLA7! Don’t listen to the haters.

[Valerie Jones @vj12]

@TRobinsonNewEra I don’t think that’s a woman…

[GregGutfeld @greggutfeld]

the best analysis of the desires and outcomes of transgenderism

[Glenn Beck @glennbeck]

I warned you in 2008 that the Left would try to erase our history. Under the Biden administration, the National Archives even put trigger warnings on the online versions of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and other crucial documents. Thankfully, the Trump Administration is working to reverse all of this nonsense. But I'd rather not take any more chances with our history. As much of it as possible MUST be in private hands.

That’s why I am opening a brick-and-mortar @aje1776 museum that will be very different from anything you have ever seen. We are building a place to tell the true, unvarnished story of America. The good, the bad, and yes, progressives, even the very ugly parts. We can’t forget how our nation was built. That's how empires fall.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

It seems like a good time to remind you that if you're a young person who turned against Israel in the last five years, you were the successful target of a coordinated influence operation meant to turn you into a useful idiot for Islamo-Leftist causes.

[Piers Morgan @piersmorgan]

Seeing the despicably cruel, heartless and abusive way that many people in UK and US have responded to the deaths of conservative politicians, Ann Widdecombe and Lindsey Graham, reminds me that the least kind people on earth are ironically those on the #BeKind woke left.

[Hon. Vickie Paladino @VickieforNYC]

I've said this before and I'll say it again.

We are in a soft secession under Zohran. He considers New York an independent city-state with its own foreign policy, immigration policy, and economic policy. He does not recognize the authority of the federal government except to the extent he can extract money or political wins from it.

The intent is to use the resources and authority of New York City to wage war against the federal government and the rest of the country. The DSA is quite open about it. They're telling us what they plan to do, and Zohran is executing.

Colluding with the Iranians was just another means to that end. They will collude with any and all of our enemies, because the stated goal of the DSA is to dismantle the country from within. Again, they say all of this out loud. No inferences necessary here.

In this particular case, the meeting with the Iranians was sidelined by the State Department. But the intention is crystal clear, and just because a high-profile meeting was stopped doesn't mean there isn't back channel communication and cooperation happening between the DSA/Mamdani admin and the Iranians. Obviously there is. Meetings like this don't just materialize out of thin air, and ties between the DSA and Iranian-linked fronts like the People's Forum are too many to count.

Now what are we actually going to do about this?

We're WAY past the point that it can honestly be argued that the DSA isn't an insurgency determined to bring down the country. I really think it requires a military solution now; take this out of the corrupt civil court system and use the military to roll up the DSA and charge them as revolutionary insurgents. Do it while we still can and avoid inevitable future bloodshed.

[Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok]

Attention everyone in Flower Mound, Texas area

The Hive Bakery apparently hates Conservatives and our country. This was their message for the 4th of July:

“We refuse to observe this holiday. F*** this fascist regime”

Would be a shame if everyone in the area saw this!

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

So glad they didn’t say “well, we don’t have 60 votes, so let’s recess and then move on to something else.”

Who’s with me?

[Katie Pavlich @KatiePavlich]

Justice Clarence Thomas:

[Valerie Jones @vj12]

@KatiePavlich I’ll be in DC next weekend. Any restaurant recommendations?

[Katie Pavlich @KatiePavlich]

The Democratic Socialists of America, which I’ve been warning about for a long time, are using democracy and our system to legitimately win power and then destroy the country from
within. They hate America, which they call “empire” and intend to annihilate it.

[Forest Park Pharmacy @ForestParkPharm]

My wife and I own Forest Park Pharmacy, and we don't accept insurance. None of it. That decision is exactly why we could fix what happened to a patient today.

A family came in wanting to transfer their kid's antibiotic to us. The child had already STARTED the course. Then, mid-treatment, the insurance company decided the last 14 tablets suddenly needed a "prior authorization" before the other pharmacy could hand them over. A sick kid, halfway through an antibiotic, and the answer was "please hold."

The drug is linezolid. It's a generic. It's been generic for over a decade. It treats serious gram-positive infections — the kind you do NOT want to stop antibiotics in the middle of, because an interrupted course is how you breed resistant bugs and end up right back where you started.

So why the hold-up on a cheap, common generic? Follow the fake math.

Insurance and the PBMs behind them price drugs off a number called AWP — "Average Wholesale Price." People in my industry have another name for it: "Ain't What's Paid." It's a benchmark number, not a real-world cost. On paper, the AWP for just those last 14 tablets is about $2,500.

My cash price for the same 14 tablets? $18.

Read that again. The system that's supposedly "protecting" this family from cost is the same system that inflated an $18 medication into a $2,500 line item, then slapped a prior auth on it to "review the expense" THEY invented. They manufactured the problem, then billed everyone for the privilege of solving it — and made a sick kid wait while they did it.

This is the whole game. When a drug is priced honestly, there's nothing to "manage." When it's priced off a fantasy benchmark, you get spread pricing, PA paperwork, pharmacy phone trees, and delayed treatment — all dressed up as cost control.

Here's the part nobody tells you: roughly 90% of prescriptions are low-cost generics. For the vast majority of what people pick up every day, running it through insurance does two things — raises the real cost and risks delaying your care. That's it. That's the value-add.

That's why we fired the insurance companies. No middleman deciding your kid can't finish their antibiotics on schedule. No fake prices. Just the real number, on the shelf, today.

The medication was always cheap. The insurance was the expensive part.

[Kerry McQuisten’s Common Sense Sanctuary @KerryMcQ4Oregon]

Let’s talk reflecting pool. Warren G. Harding built it on swampland and the structure beneath it would have been fine - if it had been built on stable ground. The whole thing started sinking slowly.

Presidents all the way up through Carter kept trying to prop it up with little cement pours, and regularly draining and cleaning it. Algae was a problem even then because there was no real circulation system. No pumps. No filters.

Reagan added some more concrete, realizing the entire pool was now 12 or 13 inches lower than it should be. It had sunk over a foot and pulled loose from its structure.

Clinton publicly acknowledged that the entire pool needed demolished and rebuilt, and that it would take hundreds of millions of dollars to do it right.

The Bushes just kept trying to plug leaks and clean it. Every time they had to drain and scrub the thing, it cost around $100,000 to do so. George W. Bush actually had plans drawn up to rebuild it. 

Obama decided to revise and execute the Bush renovation, which was needed, but it was flawed, and he spent tens of millions of dollars on it. He raised the pool up with a timber under-structure so the water ended up being even shallower, which means that’s the point at which the water started getting warmer. He also turned off the chlorinated city water supply into the pool and began pumping water in from the tidal basin - that’s the somewhat stagnant water that comes in from the Potomac River and surrounds the Jefferson Memorial. There was algae before, but with those changes came even more algae. Obama‘s reasoning was that the basin water would be cheaper instead of using the city water supply. He had the pool tiles removed from the bottom and another layer gray cement put in place along with gray-tinted reflective paint, which gradually faded away.

By the time Trump’s first term came around, the cleaning had to be done every three or four months, some of the Obama structural repairs were failing, and the leaks were rampant again.

By the time Biden got into office, Obama’s reflecting pool fixes were cracked and the pool was leaking hundreds of thousands (probably millions) of gallons of water. Biden opted to clean the pool, but performed little maintenance, and did no substantial refurbishment.

Trump’s fix was to try something that the other presidents hadn’t. Whereas Obama had used a gray reflective paint and cement, Trump tried a combination sealant liner - it isn’t paint. Those sealants are similarly light-reflective to what Obama used. Trump switched up to blue from the dark gray. He added nanobubblers.

When we walked around it the other day, there was only a small patch on the middle of the left side that may have been coming up. It was too windy and stormy to see why. It was not as if the sealant was coming up all over the pool and floating to the top because it wasn’t. We did see the algae cleaning going on and the crews, you could tell, were tired of being harassed for doing their jobs. 

Vandals have damaged the grass, they’ve cut into the liner in other places and the knife lines are clear in the videos. We did see the National Guard soldiers coming in. We also saw them placed around the America 250 construction area and in between the museums. Five vandals have been arrested since we walked through. It’s unbelievable to me that they want to destroy something we could all enjoy out of hatred for a president whose policies they don’t even understand.  And the mainstream media is reprehensible. They aren’t reporting. They’re spinning propaganda as usual.

[Allie Beth Stuckey @conservmillen]

When my oldest was born, they refused to let me hold her because her oxygen levels were low. But I was persistent, and they eventually relented, allowing her to lay on my chest until the NICU nurse came to roll her away. When the nurse arrived, I asked that they check her oxygen levels one more time before taking her. They did. Oxygen: 100%. Perfect. The nurse shrugged and left. Our baby girl was healthy. She just needed me. My heartbeat, my warmth, my touch. She needed her mom.

Stories like this aren’t rare. Newborns need their moms to regulate their oxygen and heart rate. That’s why, when at all possible, most doctors and hospitals give baby to mom right away.

We know this when it comes to normal births, but when it comes to surrogacy - especially the kind when two men are purchasing a baby from a woman - the baby is immediately and intentionally taken away from his or her mom and given to two strangers. It is not surprising that these babies often undergo complications post-birth. Beyond that, we don’t fully know the physiological and psychological effect of robbing babies of their mothers at birth.

It’s worse treatment than we give puppies and kittens, but when it’s for “inclusion,” it’s celebrated.

Adoption is one thing - it redeems a broken situation. But surrogacy is another - it intentionally creates the broken situation.

Babies’ needs will always matter more than adults’ wants.

[𝖬𝖺𝗍𝗍 𝖲𝗍𝖺𝗆𝗉𝖾𝗋 🐍 @Sneketoshi]

I want to introduce you to Steve. He’s 83. His wife died a few months ago and he comes to this lodge in Spring Mill, Indiana and draws. He taught art in Terre Haute, IN his whole life. He also did courtroom sketches in court cases. In the comments I’ll share some pics from his sketchbook. He was excited when I said I was going to share his sketches with the world.

[U.S. Air Force @usairforce]

What’s better than a rare Super Delta formation featuring the Thunderbirds and the @USNavy Blue Angels over Washington, D.C.?

Watching it from four different views for #UFCWhiteHouse as part of #Freedom250. 🇺🇸