Less Than Two Years of Trump Tariffs and Tax Cuts Generated $11.2 Trillion in US Investment

 From The Enterprise:

This month, in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, Hyundai and POSCO broke ground on a $5.8 billion electric-arc mill built to pour 2.7 million tons of automotive sheet metal a year. It is the first purpose-built automotive mill of its kind in the country, and it anchors Hyundai’s $26 billion American program. Officials put the local effect at 1,300 direct jobs and roughly 4,000 indirect ones, with the first coil targeted for 2029. The steel is meant for vehicle bodies assembled in Alabama and Georgia, coil that would otherwise have been stamped from imported steel. Contractors are already on the site in Ascension Parish.

The week before, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sat down on CNBC and put a number on the wider map. The United States, he said, now holds $1.2 trillion in commitments to build semiconductors on American soil. When this administration took office, America produced less than 2% of the world’s chips. The path Lutnick described runs toward 40%, and toward 50% if Intel’s foundry holds. 

 Liberation Day tariffs put a charge on access to the American consumer and turned the world’s richest market from a free good into a scarce one. The July 2025 tax law then changed the plant’s return. 100% expensing of equipment and qualified production property lets a firm deduct the full cost of a factory in the year it builds it. Power finished the argument for the projects that swallow electricity. American energy abundance made the American data center and the American fab among the few sites that can feed an AI load at scale. European industrial power is still expensive, and several Asian grids cannot promise the same firm load on a construction calendar, which is why data centers and leading-edge semiconductor fabs keep landing here. Reciprocal trade frameworks did the last piece of work. Tariff relief became a multi-year investment vehicle from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Europe’s industrial champions. Lutnick stated the bargain plainly. If you make it here, you don't pay tariffs, but if you don't, be prepared to pay to enter the greatest market in the world. Kevin Hassett, the president’s economic adviser, added the tax half. Tariffs are pushing people to onshore activity, and expensing is making them want to invest like crazy. (Read more.)

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U.S Median Income: $90K. Canadian? $60K.

 From Welcome to Absurdistan:

Canadians tug their forelocks and intone: Carney will fixit. No, idiots, he won’t. He broke us in 2008. He’s behind the ten bankrupting years of the stinking Trudeau clown. He broke the Bank of England, he drove Britain into the disaster it is now. He is the Undertaker of Prosperity. He is extracting our wealth and shoveling it to his investors. Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s former chief economist, and Andy Burnham’s chief adviser, now advises both men. On what? How to get out of the catastrophic bet they made on Net Zero, ESG and DEI.

Carney was point man on carbon capture/climate mitigation. He inveigled half of Europe and Asia into his fund. He has to make his investors whole. He needs a climate deal - he needs those taxes, he needs those (failed) green energy pension investments, he needs the $20 billion in climate mitigation funding for the only infrastructure project he has approved.

Like his best friend, Andy Burnham and North Sea Oil, the British and Canadian taxpayers are paying for their mistakes. Andy Burnham’s first order of business was to open Britain’s North Sea oil. The immediate benefit was to the funds who are heavily invested in climate mitigation. Like Canada’s pipeline, the only people who will profit are Carney’s investors. The British and Canadian taxpayers will make them whole. I’d put money on Carney placing carbon costs on the Keystone. A lot of money. (Read more.)

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The Canary is Singing

 From The Enterprise:

Virginia now hosts roughly 385 operating data center buildings, totaling on the order of 75 million gross square feet. Measured by square footage, that is about 5 times what Texas has, roughly 7 times California, roughly 7 times New York, and roughly 10 times Florida. Adjusted for population, the gap widens. Virginia has nearly 5 times as many data centers per resident as Texas, 6.2 times as many as California, 5.9 times as many as New York, and 8.5 times as many as Florida. Northern Virginia is the largest data center market in America and the largest in the world, and Loudoun, Prince William, and Fairfax counties alone account for roughly 80% of the Commonwealth’s inventory. Other states are still arguing from models of what might happen if a campus were to arrive. Virginia already has the record of what did happen after the campuses arrived in force and stayed.

The water claim is the one that travels fastest. Critics say the facilities will drain a community’s supply and then poison what remains with their discharge. A large share of Virginia’s data center buildings do not use meaningful quantities of water after the tanks are filled. About 40% are exclusively air- or dry-cooled, meaning they reject heat mechanically and consume almost no energy once the system is charged. Another 35% are hybrid, running dry through most of the year and switching to evaporative assistance only in the hottest stretches of summer. That leaves roughly 25% that depend on water. The phrase “data centers use water” treats those three machines as a single entity.

Virginia’s fleet consumes about 2.1 billion gallons of water a year, of which roughly 780 million gallons are discharged. The fair test is what the same land and the same 75 million square feet would demand as ordinary offices. Federal Energy Star benchmarking puts median office water use at about 14.48 gallons per square foot per year. Multiply that out, and you get roughly 1.086 billion gallons of annual use and roughly 619 million gallons of annual discharge. The data center stream is larger by volume, somewhere in the range of 16% to 26% depending on which assumptions you carry through the arithmetic. (Read more.)

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A Calculated Betrayal of America’s Working Families

From Chronicles:

In high-immigration metro areas, demand for housing has outstripped supply for years. Rents and home prices have surged at a pace that outstrips increases in median incomes. A working family in the suburbs now competes not only with other local buyers but also with a growing population whose presence is the deliberate result of immigration policy.

The same pattern appears in public schools and hospitals. Districts with rapid demographic change face larger class sizes, strained special-education budgets, and longer wait times for everything from pediatric care to elective procedures. These are not theories, but the daily realities of families who play by the rules and still watch their children’s opportunities shrink.

Then there is inflation. More people competing for the same finite goods and services—housing, medical appointments, community college seats, even supermarket shelves—pushes prices higher. The Federal Reserve may talk about aggregate demand, but it hits the budget of a nurse, electrician, or mid-level office worker as lost purchasing power.

Meanwhile, the billionaire class remains insulated. They do not compete for jobs or public-school slots. They profit from the expanded labor pool that keeps wages in check and from the consumer base that buys the products their companies sell.

But can we count on political change? “Vote the bums out!” becomes a much less effective strategy when the voting rights of citizens are diluted. Rapid population growth through immigration decreases over time the weight of existing citizens’ ballots in congressional apportionment and in the Electoral College, as the census which determines these numbers counts all residents, not just citizens. Communities that once set their own priorities find those priorities reordered by demographic shifts they never voted for. This is not xenophobia; it is simple math.

And yet a powerful faction on the left—especially those associated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—insists that infinity migration is both a moral imperative and a path to economic justice. The DSA platform and its most prominent voices call for what amounts to open borders while simultaneously promising to deliver higher wages, stronger unions, and redistribution from the billionaire class to everyone else. These goals cannot coexist. You cannot flood the low- and mid-skill labor market and then claim you will raise the floor for native workers. You cannot expand the population competing for housing, healthcare, and education while claiming to prioritize the children already here. (Read more.)

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Data Centers

 From The Enterprise:

I spent the late 1990s and early 2000s building data centers in the middle of America's largest cities. We built them in Dallas, Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and St. Louis. Thousands of people walked past our buildings every day. They did not protest them. Most did not even know what was inside. That silence was not a cover for some environmental menace. Our data centers were good neighbors. They occupied underused buildings, produced almost no traffic, and bought enormous amounts of electricity from the grid while our cooling systems consumed no water. Servers and telecommunications gear hummed behind anonymous walls while the fiber inside connected businesses and consumers to a rapidly expanding Internet.

 We were hardly alone. After the Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened local telephone networks to competition, venture-backed companies raced to build carrier hotels and colocation facilities across the country. Section 251 of that law required incumbent carriers to interconnect with competitors, which created demand for neutral buildings where rival networks could meet. Equinix, Colo[.]com, Exodus, Switch & Data, LayerOne and scores of others poured billions of dollars into the physical plant of the dot-com economy. The Federal Reserve later described "a massive boom in the sector, beginning in 1997." Then the bubble burst, investors lost fortunes, and the data centers remained. They became the backbone of the cloud, mobile communications, streaming, e-commerce, and now AI. (Read more.)

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How Beijing Laundered $230 Billion in Exports

 From The Enterprise:

Consider a homeowner who installs a good deadbolt on his front door. A month later, he checks his records and finds that no one has forced the front door since the day the lock was installed. He also finds that his television is gone. The lock worked exactly as designed, which is why the thief stopped using the door. What the homeowner needs is not a better lock but a survey of his windows.

In 2018, President Trump used Section 301 to put a real tariff rate on Chinese goods, a price an importer had to actually pay at the border rather than a figure riddled with carve-outs. Chinese exporters responded, as any rational party would, to the price by looking for a cheaper route. They found one, and the route ran through Mexico, Vietnam, Malaysia, and a few dozen other jurisdictions willing to sell a stitch, a stamp, and a certificate of origin.

On Thursday, the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, Peter Navarro’s shop, published a 25-page report called

The Great Transshipment Scam

. The language was blunt enough that even the Associated Press could not soften it into a story about supply chain diversification. The report describes a global architecture built for one purpose, a lattice of free trade zones, bonded warehouses, processing corridors, and re-export centers. It says plainly that the rerouting “made it look like US imports from China had dropped” while Beijing kept the factories, the workers, the tooling, and the profits. Navarro’s own summary was less clinical. For years, he said, the great transshipment scam has let communist China launder its exports. (Read more.)

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Laundering Our Tax Dollars

 From Tierney's Real News:

Mike Benz, John Solomon, Marco Rubio, and RFK Jr. have all given recent interviews about how Team Obama and the Deep State used USAID to launder our money all over the world and then back to America to take out President Trump.

They are all saying the same thing in different ways. The left-wing Deep State has been doing this for decades and laundered TRILLIONS of taxpayer dollars for Globalist (Communist) operations that are designed to destroy us. That’s how you know it’s all true!

Mike Benz was a speech writer for Ben Carson and Stephen Miller, a leader in the US State Department under President Trump's first term and hired by Marco Rubio to dismantle and restructure USAID in Trump's second term.

Mike Benz said that Barack Obama was using USAID to pretend to send money to a country for “aid” and instead laundering it to the Cayman Islands. He would then use that money to fund and train “Rent-a-Riots” for protests to overthrow governments, including ours.

Sound familiar? (Read more.)

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No More Free Money: The Conservative Case for Taxpayer Capitalism

 From The Enterprise:

It is worth being precise about what socialism actually is, because the word is doing an enormous amount of unearned work in this debate. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy identifies capitalism by three features. The bulk of productive property is privately owned, workers own their own labor, and markets allocate inputs, outputs, consumption, and investment. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts the contrast plainly: an economy becomes socialist when it rejects private ownership of the means of production in favor of public or social ownership. Notice what these definitions do not say. Neither says that an economy becomes socialist when the government holds a financial asset. Socialism is a claim about who owns and directs production, not a claim about whether a public entity appears anywhere on a cap table.

Ludwig von Mises, who was hardly soft on the subject, drew the line with characteristic bluntness. Publicly owned enterprises operating inside a larger structure of private firms, market prices, and economic calculation remain subject to the laws of the market. “The system remains a market society,” he wrote. Real socialism arrives when the state decides what factories produce, whom they hire, what wages they pay, where they buy their inputs, and where they sell their output. Apply that test to the transactions actually in front of us and the accusation collapses. Not one of these agreements transfers a single one of those decisions to a government office. (Read more.)

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The Culture of the Medieval Merchant

 From Medievalists:

Medieval merchants were far more than buyers and sellers: their need to calculate risks, communicate across borders and navigate distant markets made them some of the most knowledgeable people of their age. Commerce helped drive the spread of literacy and important developments in mathematics, accounting, law, languages and mapmaking, while the vast records merchants left behind offer unusually vivid glimpses into medieval society. Their influence also reached beyond the marketplace, as they commissioned art, collected books, wrote chronicles, governed cities and financed civic buildings. Long before the Renaissance merchant became associated with cultural patronage, medieval traders were already helping to shape Europe’s intellectual, artistic and urban worlds. (Read more.)

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BREAKING: JD Vance Announces Task Force Has Uncovered Billions in Fraud

 From America First:

Vice President JD Vance delivered a striking update on the Trump administration’s fight against government fraud during a Cabinet meeting at Camp David, announcing that a task force he leads has identified $230 billion in fraudulent or improper payments perpetrated against the American people, with $56 billion of that amount already halted before it went out the door.

The announcement came during the first-ever live-streamed Cabinet meeting held at Camp David, a format that allowed Americans to watch the administration’s internal deliberations in real time. Vance, who has served as the chair of the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud since President Trump established it by executive order in March 2026, framed the findings as one of the clearest early wins of the administration’s broader push to root out waste and corruption in the federal government.

“Just since the beginning of the Fraud Task Force that I started under the president’s leadership and direction, we have identified $230 billion of fraud that’s being perpetrated against the American people, and we have halted already $56 billion of that,” Vance told the gathered Cabinet, according to multiple accounts of the meeting. (Read more.)

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House Passes Bill to Ban Congressional Stock Trading and Require Voter ID

 From Big League Politics:

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed legislation that would prohibit members of Congress and their immediate families from trading individual stocks while also requiring photo identification for voting in federal elections.

The bill passed by a vote of 232-198, with 13 Democrats joining Republicans in support.

The legislation combines two major Republican priorities: cracking down on congressional stock trading and implementing a nationwide voter ID requirement for federal elections.

The measure, known as the Stop Insider Trading Act, was introduced by Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.) and seeks to prevent lawmakers from personally profiting from information obtained through their positions in Congress.

Under the bill:

• Members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children would be prohibited from purchasing publicly traded stocks.

• Lawmakers would be required to publicly disclose planned stock sales at least seven days before they occur.

• Violations would carry penalties of $2,000 or 10% of the transaction’s value, whichever is greater, along with forfeiture of any profits earned from the trade.

Steil argued the legislation would help restore public confidence by ensuring elected officials cannot use nonpublic information for personal financial gain. (Read more.)

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The Democratic Socialists’ War on America

 From AMAC:

America’s most radical left-wing movement is no longer content to protest from outside; it is now working to dismantle the republic from within. It would be a grave error to dismiss members of the Democratic Socialists of America as mere campus radicals or online agitators. In New York City and beyond, the group and its allies have scored primary victories, toppling incumbents and capturing nominations. The DSA wants power, and it is learning how to seize it.

That is why its agenda demands scrutiny.

In June, as City Journal reported, DSA national leadership adopted a revamped platform titled “Workers Deserve More!” The innocuous name belies a radical program to upend America’s constitutional order.

The document calls for scrapping the U.S. Senate, replacing the president and Supreme Court with bodies chosen by and subordinate to Congress, drafting a new constitution, and creating a “democratic socialist republic.” It goes far beyond higher taxes or regulation: it seeks to abolish the separation of powers crafted by the Founders.

The DSA is not demanding different policies. It is demanding a different country. (Read more.)

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Why SpaceX's S-1 Is the Century's Most Important Corporate Document

 From Alexander Muse on Amuse on X:

Yesterday, Starship Flight 12 lifted 45 tons of payload to orbit, the largest single launch by mass since the Saturn V hauled Skylab in 1973. Two days earlier, SpaceX completed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC, the document that will govern the company once it begins trading under the ticker SPCX on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas. Most readers will treat these as separate stories, one a feat of engineering and the other a paperwork milestone. They are the same story. The S-1 is the corporate-law expression of what makes Starship possible, and what makes Boeing’s Starliner an embarrassment. I spent several hours reading the filing and the two exhibits containing Musk’s compensation awards, and I want to explain why every serious founder taking a company public over the next decade should study this document the way constitutional lawyers study the Federalist Papers.

Begin with the basic architecture. Before the IPO, SpaceX has three classes of common stock, but the structure investors will actually buy into is cleaner than that. As part of the offering, all of the existing Class C shares will be reclassified into Class A, leaving the public company with two classes of common stock. Class A carries 1 vote per share. Class B carries 10 votes per share. The economics across the classes are identical, meaning equal dividends, equal liquidation rights, and equivalent consideration in any sale or merger. Public investors are not subordinated economically, not by a penny. What they do not receive is the right to overrule the founder on strategic questions. The exact ownership and voting percentages are left blank in the S-1 pending final pricing, but press coverage of the filing has reported that Musk will hold somewhere around 93% of the Class B shares and approximately 85% of the total voting power after the offering. Class B holders, voting separately, are entitled under the S-1 to elect a majority of the board, which the charter sets at 51% rounded up. Class B shares automatically convert into Class A on any transfer outside a narrow set of permitted exceptions, which means the supervoting control is personal to Musk and cannot be auctioned to the highest bidder. This is the dual-class structure Larry Page defended in his 2004 Google founders’ letter, refined and hardened. (Read more.)

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America’s Silent Socialist Shift

 From Sharyl's Substack:

The United States was founded as a democratic republic with a Constitution that explicitly limits federal power, protects individual liberties, and restrains government from overreaching into private life and the economy.

The framers emphasized enumerated powers, separation of powers, federalism, and checks and balances to prevent the concentration of authority that could lead to tyranny.

Yet over time, particularly since the Progressive Era and accelerating through the New Deal, Great Society, and subsequent expansions, American society has adopted numerous features of socialism and communism.

These include centralized government control over key sectors, heavy redistribution of resources from producers to non-producers, expansive regulatory bureaucracies, and a cultural shift toward viewing the state as the primary solver of social and economic problems.

While the U.S. retains capitalist markets and democratic elections, these developments represent a gradual drift toward collectivist principles—state ownership or heavy direction of production, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”—that contrast with the founders’ vision of limited government. (Read more.)

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JFK’s Revenge

 From The New Criterion:

Thanks mostly to President Trump, the Communist regime in Cuba is on the brink of collapse, with oil supplies cut off and much of the country without electricity or power. Cubans are dealing with food and medicine shortages and with the breakdown of public services. Prices are high and rising rapidly; inflation approached 40 percent last year. The Trump administration recently imposed new sanctions on Cuban leaders and on economic and political organizations that continue to support the regime. Pressures from Washington are certain to continue, notwithstanding complaints from progressives who hope to keep the Cuban government intact.    

It is little wonder that protestors are in the streets of Cuba shouting “Down with Communism.” The spirit of the Cuban revolution, completed in 1958 by Fidel Castro amid promises of reform, prosperity, and freedom from U.S. imperialism, turned to ashes decades ago, long before El Comandante died in 2016. The regime is now collapsing for real. Those who can are getting out, just as they did decades ago. 

The Cuban economy was never self-sufficient. It was propped up for decades by subsidies from the Soviet Union, in return for pledges to spread Castro’s revolution throughout Latin America.  The collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991 provoked a severe economic crisis across Cuba as that aid dried up. During Barack Obama’s presidency, Cuban leaders entertained hopes that the United States might bail out the revolution with new subsidies and favorable trade policies.  Donald Trump put an end to that fantasy after he was elected in 2016.

More recently, Venezuela, under Maduro’s left-wing government, stepped in to supply Cuba with low-priced oil, in exchange for Cuban military and medical support. That arrangement ended when President Trump toppled Maduro’s regime at the beginning of this year. Cuba now has nowhere else to turn. The regime has run out of other people’s money. (Read more.)

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The Art of the Tariff

 From Tierney's Real News:

Trump is not going to Beijing empty-handed. He is bringing a delegation that includes leaders like Tim Cook from Apple, Elon Musk from Tesla, Larry Fink of BlackRock, and executives from Blackstone, Boeing, Cargill, Citigroup, Coherent, GE Aerospace, Goldman Sachs, Illumina, Mastercard, Meta, Micron Technology, Qualcomm and Visa. That is deliberate. Scott Bessent will be by his side. That is strategic.

The stick consists of using legally durable Section 301 tariffs targeting China’s core industrial strategy.

The carrot offers an immediate economic upside through purchase agreements, market access, and regulatory stability.

For China, the message is simple. If they cooperate, they stabilize their export machine. If they resist, they face tariffs that are far harder to challenge or delay. (Read more.)

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Why America is at War with Iran

 From Culturcidal:

America’s entanglement with Iran really started when they elected a prime minister who soon thereafter nationalized their oil industry, which the British then controlled. We tried to mediate the issue between the countries, but we were closer allies with Britain and soon began to fear that Iran was going to drift toward the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. During the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviets treated the whole planet like pieces on a chessboard, this drove a lot of our foreign policy decisions. In this case, it prompted us to partner with Britain and help the Shah of Iran, who was already part of the government, to take FULL CONTROL of the country.

The Shah was friendly to us. He also wanted to Westernize Iran and make it into a regional power. He had some success on this front. Economic conditions improved rapidly, he gave women the right to vote (although voting for everyone was limited), their military became stronger, and things were going in the right direction in Iran in many respects.

That being said, the Shah was a dictator and would still throw you in prison if you stood against him. This led to the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Although many groups across Iran helped to get rid of the Shah, ultimately, the religious crazies led by the Ayatollah Khomeini ended up in charge. As it turned out, they were more oppressive than the Shah, more murderous, and the rapid improvement of Iran that happened under the Shah dramatically slowed down and even regressed in many ways. (Read more.)

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Cash For Havana

 From AND Magazine:

Times are tough in Havana. Trump has cut off Venezuelan oil. The Mexicans have made some reassuring noises, but don’t seem inclined to fill the gap. The Chinese and Russians have no appetite for trying to break an American embargo in the face of U.S. naval forces. So, the Cubans have gone begging. Their friends in America are pushing the equivalent of a GoFundMe page for Communism on our soil.

Trump’s fuel blockade is starving Cuba of power, crippling hospitals and schools, and attempting to induce a famine.

We are rushing solar generators and panels to our neighbors 90 miles away so that hospitals can keep their doors open and their lights on. Your donation helps ensure patients receive the essential care they need.

This crisis does not have to exist. It was created by the Trump Administration and should be reversed immediately.

Until these cruel policies end, as neighbors, we must act and send aid.

Help us stop the Trump Administration from creating famine in Cuba.

Donate now. Send power. Save lives.

People’s Forum

Yes, this is the same People’s Forum run by Neville Roy Singham, the Chinese agent who operates out of Shanghai and bankrolls a wide variety of anti-American groups on U.S. soil. Why he is allowed to continue to do so remains a question only the FBI and DOJ can answer.

The focus on solar panels here is an interesting touch. It pays homage to the climate change narrative that is an accepted mantra in leftist circles, while at the same time nicely ignoring the fact that any money raised will go to the Cubans to spend as they wish. Interestingly, in the instructions for donors is this guidance. “Please do not write ‘Cuba’ in donation comments or on the memo line of checks. Simply write ‘Urgent Aid.’”

Those interested in sending hard copy checks are in fact, simply directed to mail the checks to the People’s Forum in Manhattan.

Most instructive of all, however, is the list of sponsors of this panhandling exercise. They include the usual lost souls, actors Ed Harris, Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, and Jane Fonda among them, but also a number of radical Marxist organizations dedicated to the destruction of the republic: The 50501 organization, the ANSWER Coalition, CODEPINK, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), and the National Network on Cuba. Probably every one of those organizations should have been shut down long ago. (Read more.)

 

Also from AND Magazine:

We wrote recently about the ongoing effort by Marxists in the United States to raise money on behalf of the Communist government in Cuba. That effort continues. Meanwhile, the same folks, in league with a whole raft of other radical leftist groups, are also working on sending a “flotilla” to Havana’s aid. 

A growing coalition of international organizations, including Progressive International, The People’s Forum, CODEPINK, and allied movements across the Americas and beyond is coming together to launch the Nuestra América Flotilla to Cuba in March, 2026, a humanitarian and solidarity mission to the island at a moment of deep crisis.

As U.S. policies continue to suffocate the island’s access to fuel, medicine, and essential goods, we believe this is the moment to act. We are organizing a people-powered mission to break the blockade and deliver aid as well as a powerful message: the people of Cuba are not alone.

The Nuestra América Flotilla will sail toward Cuba, carrying humanitarian aid and representing a united front of organizations committed to peace, sovereignty, and cooperation across borders.

We invite organizations, networks, and individuals committed to international solidarity and humanitarian action to join this historic initiative.

Code Pink – One of the many Marxist organizations inside the United States affiliated with Neville Roy Singham’s CCP-aligned network. (Read more.)

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Our Low Agency Elite

 From Becoming Noble:

There is no shortage of challenges over which conservative elites should be asserting agency: the collapse in birthrates and faith, a disappearance of standards in aesthetics and etiquette, obesity and pornography crises, and the ceding of patronage and control over the high arts to liberals.

The resolution of these challenges can’t just rely on donations to think tanks and political entities to outsource change. It requires mounting powerful, detailed, iterative, personal interventions in their own communities and localities. Subsidiarity is effective.

Conservative elites are usually wealthy precisely because they are high agency. Most are first-generation wealth and have demonstrated entrepreneurialism and determination. But agency can be a far narrower quality than is generally recognized. An individual can be highly agentic within specific domains and completely inert in others.

The most important factor for building and maintaining agency is positive feedback, which reaffirms personal efficacy. From Albert Bandura’s seminal paper ‘Toward a Psychology of Human Agency’:

Among the mechanisms of human agency, none is more central or pervasive than belief of personal efficacy. This core belief is the foundation of human agency.

Belief in one’s efficacy is a key personal resource in personal development and change. It operates through its impact on cognitive, motivational, affective, and decisional processes. Efficacy beliefs affect whether individuals think optimistically or pessimistically, in self-enhancing or self-debilitating ways. Such beliefs affect people’s goals and aspirations, how well they motivate themselves, and their perseverance in the face of difficulties and adversity. Efficacy beliefs also shape people’s outcome expectations—whether they expect their efforts to produce favorable outcomes or adverse ones.…

…efficacy beliefs determine the choices people make at important decisional points. A factor that influences choice behavior can profoundly affect the courses lives take.

One of capitalism’s great strengths is that it has a clear reward function (wealth). The directness of this reward is ideal for fostering agency. The target is clear, the possibility of success is evident, one is encouraged to pursue it, tools are available, and momentum is felt as success builds. Personal efficacy is reified. (Read more.)

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Senator Kennedy on Who Really Controls the Democrat Party

 From The Vigilant Fox:

Kennedy argues that moderate Democrats are no longer in charge but are being controlled by the radical “Karen” wing of the party.

The Gateway Pundit reported that in January, the House of Representatives voted 220-207 to pass a Department of Homeland funding bill, which funds the TSA and ICE.

Fox News reported that the seven Democrats who voted with Republicans did so “despite opposition from their own leadership over unmet demands for additional guardrails on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations.”

The DHS bill will be bundled alongside three other spending bills, totaling a combined $1.2 trillion in federal spending. The entire package’s passing is a significant step toward averting a government shutdown come Jan. 30.

Lawmakers in the House of Representatives voted on two separate packages on Thursday afternoon. One groups together three spending bills to fund the departments of War, Education, Labor, Transportation and Health and Human Services. The second is a standalone bill funding DHS, which includes ICE.

Jacqui Heinrich asked Kennedy about Democrats who opposed leadership, including Congressman Tom Suozzi (D-NY), after sharing a clip of Suozzi being heckled at a town hall by an anti-ICE activist.

“So, Tom Suozzi was one of seven Democrats who voted with Republicans, and that’s the reception he’s getting at home. What does that tell you?” Heinrich asked.

Senator Kennedy replied, “It tells me that the Karen wing, the Loon wing, Bolshevik wing, whatever you want to call it, Jackie, is firmly in control of the Democratic Party.”

“And whether we ever pass a bill, a budget for the Department of Homeland Security will require our Democratic leadership to embrace adulthood, because that’s what this discussion is all about.”

“It’s not, as it should be, a discussion of the efficient use of taxpayer money and funding ICE and DHS. It’s just the Karen wing of the Democratic Party wants to defund ICE.”

“They believe in open borders.”

“They also wanted to defund the cops, defund police.”

“We know how that vampire movie turned out. Now they’ve moved on to defunding ICE, and the Democrats, the leadership anyway, not people like John Fetterman, but the Democrats are scared of them.” (Read more.)

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