[NYPost] Anonymously sourced hit pieces have hammered Tulsi Gabbard the past few months in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, you name it.
They are part of a relentless campaign to undermine President Trump’s director of national intelligence because she is almost single-handedly revealing the dirty secrets of the Deep State.
Rumors swirl around Washington that the president is displeased with her and she will soon follow Pam Bondi out the door.
But that doesn’t appear to be the case.
The commander-in-chief is unwavering in his support for her when reporters ask, including during an impromptu press conference on Air Force One last week.
“Sure,” he said when asked if he still has “confidence” in Gabbard after the incendiary resignation of one of her top aides, Joe Kent, over his opposition to the Iran war.
“She’s a little bit different in her thought process than me, but that doesn’t make somebody not available to serve,” said Trump.
He was even more effusive last summer on my podcast “Pod Force One,” after Gabbard held a bombshell press conference announcing she had sent criminal referrals to the DOJ and FBI implicating former President Barack Obama in the “seditious conspiracy” of the Russia collusion hoax.
“Tulsi’s done a great job,” said Trump.
“You know there were some people that really wanted Tulsi — they thought she was going to do a fantastic job … She’s tough and she’s smart and she went … deep into the files and she found it … Look, this was an attempted coup … A lot of people would not have found [the classified documents showing Obama’s role].
“They wouldn’t have found it to be politically correct to find it, OK? It would be easier not to.”
More than anyone else in the administration, Gabbard is carrying out the president’s express wishes to declassify information in order to bring wrongdoers to account and shine a light on the various Deep State plots against him — from Russiagate to Ukraine impeachment and perhaps even the multiple assassination attempts.
Yet she is repeatedly obstructed and sabotaged in her efforts to declassify material, not just by the Democrats and their Deep State allies who are terrified of her, but by the very agencies that carried out the anti-Trump plots, weaponized intelligence under Democratic Presidents Obama and Joe Biden, and hid the evidence.
Trump’s own appointees, Kash Patel at the FBI and John Ratcliffe at the CIA, appear to be engaged in turf wars, or at least have allowed their bureaucrats to stymie her work.
You don’t need inside information to know that. The tensions are there for all to see.
The disharmony sometimes has gone public, such as when the FBI sent a sharply worded letter to Congress last October, expressing “strong objection” to a proposal that would have streamlined counterintelligence coordination across the government by making Gabbard’s ODNI the lead agency.
There was friction, too, about Gabbard’s intervention in the FBI’s slow investigation into election irregularities in Fulton County, Ga., which Trump himself asked her to oversee.
Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington on ‘Pod Force One.’ Subscribe here!
CIA RESISTANCE
The CIA tried to resist Gabbard when she declassified a 2020 report from the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, and anonymous officials used the old “sources and methods” line to complain to the media.
When Gabbard quite rightly advised Trump to strip security clearances from 37 current and former intelligence officials who had engaged in “politicization or weaponization of intelligence,” she was accused by unnamed CIA officials of endangering an “undercover” officer by disclosing her name.
But that former CIA official, Julia Gurganus — who oversaw the politicized, Obama-ordered intelligence community assessment that was central to the Russia hoax — was a public figure who cited her own CIA credentials in appearances at conferences and think-tank events, and whose photo was on her public biography on The Atlantic website.
Sources say Gurganus was hastily designated “undercover” a couple of months before her security clearance was revoked as a ploy to protect her from Trump’s wrath.
Inexplicably, Gabbard also had to fight with the CIA bureaucracy to release information that showed the agency in a bad light under Biden, including its failure to vet 18,000 known or suspected terrorists who were allowed to enter the US in the frenzy after Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal.
Behind the scenes, tensions are worse, with White House officials reportedly called in to adjudicate at times.
No doubt the leaks to the media come from disgruntled institutionalists who don’t want Trump to discover what they’ve been up to.
But it is hard enough to bring sneaky people to account without the agencies that hold the evidence squabbling with each other.
Despite the sabotage, Gabbard plows on, with several more bombshell ODNI declassification releases expected soon:
Transcripts from closed congressional hearings in 2019 with former Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, whose whistleblower referral triggered the first impeachment of Trump.
They are expected to show that the impeachment was based on the flimsiest pretext, highly spun second- and third-hand accounts of a telephone conversation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump asked the Ukrainian leader to help with the investigation into Hunter Biden’s lucrative influence peddling in his country when his father was VP.
COVID files, including a surprising number of US-funded bio labs in Ukraine, China and elsewhere.
ADDED PRESSURE||
Kent’s resignation as director of the National Counterterrorism Center and subsequent anti-war media tour have added to pressure on Gabbard by those in the administration who suspect her of harboring the same antiwar, Israel-conspiracy views.
But by fair accounts, Gabbard, a military veteran and former Democratic presidential candidate who with RFK Jr. formed part of Trump’s broad-tent philosophy that won the 2024 election, has behaved professionally and dispassionately and does not share Kent’s apocalyptic views.
When she briefs the president on Iran intelligence from the 18 intelligence agencies she oversees, for instance, she delivers the unvarnished facts, as the president deserves.
The intelligence from other agencies does not conflict with the CIA’s, but each agency’s analysis is slightly nuanced, providing a more complete picture for decision-makers.
Surely that’s why we have so many intelligence agencies, and the ODNI to oversee them, so as to avoid the tunnel vision, manufactured intelligence, and mixed signals that led to 9/11 and the ill-fated Iraq war.
The attacks on Gabbard are dismaying for the 54% of American voters, according to a Rasmussen poll last year, who believe Gabbard’s claim that Obama administration officials “committed serious crimes by manipulating intelligence” to falsely claim Russia interfered with the 2016 election to get Trump in the Oval Office.
It’s even more dismaying for the 69% who demand accountability for those crimes.
With only months left before Democrats may take back the House
…,if they do — it’s apparently looking significantly less likely, thank goodness…
and start impeaching Trump again, accountability is nowhere to be seen for the likes of Russia hoaxers John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey, let alone the nameless Deep Staters still burrowed in at the agencies.
[PJMedia] By now, you’ve seen my piece from yesterday, "The Islamic Immigrant Problem." The huge response to that article continues to amaze me, frankly.
So you might imagine the look on my face when this Fox News headline greeted me: "King Chuck ...King of England, Scotland, Ireland -- at least part of it -- Wales, Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, and places like that. The first King Chuck had his head chopped off, the second one was Good Time Charlie. The third once wanted to be a tampon and thinks we'll all be extinct within the next seven years... sparks backlash from UK Christians by not delivering an Easter message this year." This is after taking the time to wish a "blessed and happy Ramadan" on social media in February. Apparently, maintaining an image is not exactly Charles' forte'.
"This came as a shock to most U.K. Christians here in the United Kingdom... we expect a message from the Monarch," Neil Sean, a royal commentator, told Fox News Digital.
He added, "It’s not clear why he’s decided to not offer a message up, which is why the British people are angry... but more so when he made video contributions filmed inside Royal palaces for Eid and Ramadan." Sean noted that Charles is being accused in the United Kingdom as being a "secret Moslem."
For someone who swore at his coronation to "uphold the faith," this seems a strange way to accomplish that goal.
Ian Pelham Turner, a royals expert, echoed Sean's sentiments and explained that this was an easy way for Charles to start another scandal overseas.
"How do you turn a Royal drama into a crisis? Simply do not follow decades of tradition and decide not to write an Easter message even though King Charles is head of the Church and swore an oath at his Coronation to uphold the faith," Turner said.
"At a time when there are tensions in the country over the further evolution of Islam and the beliefs many believe that Charles is a closet Moslem add on to the fact that the newly ordained Archbishop of Canterbury is the first woman in centuries and this will cause controversy for her to deal with it just leaves William no doubt to fulfill a plan already orchestrated to fill the gap," he continued.
The people surrounding the royal family do not seem to be all on the same page regarding this business, with some saying the lack of an Easter message was a mistake, and others suggesting there is no tradition of a royal Easter message.
Regardless of how you read all of this, it does seem like another public relations crisis at the palace, at the very least.
After his (30-minute-long!) message to Moslems last month, the Brits are taking this as a huge snub at least, and given that around only 6 or 7% of Brits are Islamists, an indicator that will surely be seen as the tail wagging the dog. With the palace identifying the tensions over the growth (and threat) of Islam within the UK, some reinforcement by the "defender of the faith" would be in order. Charles didn't, and there's a serious problem brewing because of that lack.
Ironically, Charles said, as a part of his Ramadan message: "There are moments in ones life when silence speaks louder than proclamation."
I'd say offhand that that's very true and that one of two things is going on here: Either he didn't think this non-message through, or the silence is an indication of a line of thinking he dare not speak aloud.
A comment on X about all of this says it well:
The head of the Church of England going out of his way to mark Eid and Ramadan while Christians wait to see if Easter gets the same energy from the palace is a legitimate question, not fake outrage. Equal treatment isn't a radical ask. If the institution exists to defend the faith it was built on, Easter Sunday should be the easiest message of the year to send. The fact that it's even a question tells you everything about where the establishment's priorities have drifted.
Indeed. As an indicator of how far the "defender of the faith" has slipped, do you notice that we're now struggling for equal treatment of Islam and the Christian faith, which he's supposed to be defending?
#1
If king is afraid to express Christian sentiments because it might offend the Muslims, it's time to get medieval on their asses.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/09/2026 12:25 Comments ||
Top||
#2
At one point the discussion was around evidence that then-Prince Charles had converted to Islam, Abu Uluque. So not afraid, just not bothering to coddle the dhimmis anymore.
Great Britain, when Christian, was good --
Well, as good as it could be -- and stood For the best. Now The Man
Has a plan: "Look! The Klan!
And Crusaders!" [Mohammedan wood]
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited by Dmitry Gubin
[REGNUM] Sixty years ago, on April 8, 1966, at the Party Congress, Leonid Brezhnev was elected General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. By that time, he had been the country's top official for over two years. The party elite, having overthrown Nikita Khrushchev, elevated Brezhnev to first among equals. It seemed that the changes in the party leader's "title" were purely symbolic: from 1964 to 1966, Leonid Brezhnev had been First Secretary of the Central Committee, and now the position had been renamed "General Secretary." But the details matter.
Joseph Stalin held the position of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and later of the CPSU, until his death. Khrushchev, a loyal Stalinist, having sidelined other contenders for the "master's" legacy and concentrated power, began, among other things, to renew the symbolic "façade." Therefore, in September 1953, he became First Secretary, not General Secretary.
Under Khrushchev, the Politburo was called the Presidium of the Central Committee. Strictly speaking, this rebranding occurred during Stalin's lifetime, in 1952, but the new name was still perceived as something fresh, in the spirit of the numerous innovations that marked Nikita Sergeyevich's "reign."
There have been plenty of them in less than 11 years—from debunking the personality cult to replacing Moscow's sectoral ministries with regional economic councils (national economic councils), from the corn campaign to the project to split regional and city party committees into industrial and agricultural ones. And that's not counting the spontaneous personnel decisions.
The period now called the Thaw was a natural disaster for the ruling nomenklatura.
The long-time First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR, Mykola Podgorny, said that "Nikita" often "pulled the blanket over himself," interfering in affairs at all levels of the power vertical, and disregarding respected comrades at the local level. But most importantly, he scandalously removed Podgorny from his post as Ukrainian leader, a move Podgorny never forgot or forgave, becoming a participant in the 1964 conspiracy.
Khrushchev's foreign policy, culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis, also caused confusion among the highest echelons of the party and government. The usually calm Brezhnev, years after his predecessor's overthrow, was not holding back his emotions.
"He suddenly got worked up. He remembered Khrushchev, who, in his words, had left such a situation that moving toward peace had probably become more difficult than it had been ten years before 1964. He had taken a foolish gamble in the Caribbean affair, and then he had shit his pants," Anatoly Chernyaev, an employee of the Central Committee's International Department from 1961 to 1986, reported Leonid Ilyich's words in his memoirs.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Khrushchev, like his discredited predecessor Stalin, concentrated power in his hands. Hence the accusations of notorious voluntarism—that is, tyranny and disregard for "Leninist norms of leadership."
But Khrushchev's personal regime, unlike Stalin's tyranny, was "without arms." Nikita Sergeyevich could rely neither on the party nomenklatura (infuriated by the experiments with industrial and agricultural regional committees), nor on the army (dissatisfied with the cuts of 1955, 1958, and 1960), nor on the repressive apparatus.
THE ILLUSION OF COLLEGIALITY, THE APPEARANCE OF RESTORATION
KGB chief Vladimir Semichastny was one of the driving forces behind the conspiracy, as was former head of state security and, in 1964, head of the Council of Ministers Alexander Shelepin, nicknamed Iron Shurik.
The "Komsomol members" (as the duumvirate of Shelepin and Semichastny, who came from the Komsomol leadership, was called) were counting on a return to the "post-1953" situation, when, following Stalin's death, there was no clear leader.
The penultimate palace coup of the Soviet era (the GKChP putsch can be considered the last)—the plenum at which Khrushchev was stripped of all his posts and sent into retirement—was held under the banner of “normalization” and a return to collegial rule.
The team was quite narrow: Podgorny, Shelepin, Semichastny, the new head of the Council of Ministers, Alexei Kosygin, and Brezhnev as the formal leader of the group that came to power.
The leadership of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers, which had previously been in the hands of Khrushchev, was divided between Brezhnev and Kosygin.
Normalization also implied a partial restoration of Stalin's "façade," complete with the General Secretary and Politburo. The 23rd Congress of the CPSU—where the cosmetic changes were approved—became for Brezhnev what the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) had been for Stalin: a "congress of victors." More precisely, a victor.
By this time, in the apparatus struggle, he had removed “Iron Shurik” Shelepin and Semichastny from the field (in 1967 they were removed from their posts), weakened Podgorny’s position and left economic issues to Kosygin.
Like Stalin in the late 1920s, Brezhnev in the late 1960s relied on the vertical chain of command of party leaders to push his competitors out of power.
But the times were already, as they said then, vegetarian. The retired leaders continued their careers, and the deposed Khrushchev lived out his days as a personal pensioner at his dacha in Petrovo-Dalny, tending a vegetable garden and listening to "Western voices."
But the main thing is that the principle of consolidation around the leader changed: not career advancement “on the bones” of repressed predecessors, but the rule that Leonid Ilyich strictly observed until his death: live yourself and let others live.
LIEBERMAN-KOSYGIN REFORM
The party and Soviet nomenklatura breathed a sigh of relief. Hysterical reprimands, illogical personnel changes, and constant shifts in development priorities disappeared from their lives for a long time.
When it became clear that no one in the Kremlin would show their hand anymore, the time came for economic reforms.
And this happened at the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU in September 1965. The reforms, although they did not entail changes in forms of ownership or, for example, the liquidation of party committees at enterprises, turned out to be quite reasonable.
It seemed like nothing complicated: sectoral ministries were being reinstated in place of regional economic councils, and at the enterprises themselves, not only directives from the center became important, but also performance and profitability indicators.
The word “profit” has gone from being a semi-abusive concept in the political economy of capitalism to one of the goals of a socialist enterprise.
The economic reform was popularly called the Kosygin reform after the person primarily responsible for its implementation. But its true author was someone else—Kharkiv professor and economist Evsey Grigoryevich Liberman (1898–1981).
Even under Khrushchev, in September 1962, the newspaper Pravda published an article by Lieberman entitled “Plan, Profit, and Bonus.”
What the non-party Jew—who was also a victim of repression—explained on the pages of the main party organ was a sensation.
It turns out that the USSR desperately needs reform of its industrial planning and incentive mechanisms; otherwise, stagnation and catastrophic underperformance relative to capitalist countries are inevitable. Enterprises everywhere are "overfulfilling" their plans, producing low-quality and unsold products that, nevertheless, are counted toward gross production figures.
Liberman proposed taking into account in plans not gross indicators, but the cost of sold products, and giving company directors a greater degree of independence in relations with partners and in the management of working capital.
The article was published in Pravda, so the action plan, by definition, could not have been the opinion of Comrade Lieberman alone. It was a trial balloon launched by Kosygin's team.
The following year after the coup, in 1965, the plenum of the CPSU Central Committee approved Kosygin's own reform: the introduction of enterprise profitability assessment based on revenue from sales into the planning system. However, this was only one indicator, alongside the traditional gross profit.
The 1966 "Victor's Congress" sanctioned the continuation of reforms: as an experiment, bonuses for the best employees were permitted, but only at 8% of wages and only at 43 enterprises across the country. Enterprises were also allowed to enter into direct supply contracts with each other without the approval of central ministries.
On February 12, 1965, the popular American magazine Time published a photo on its cover with the caption “Soviet economist Lieberman.”
The issue's main article, headlined "Communists Flirt with Profit," was devoted to the current state of the Soviet economy and the role of Professor Lieberman's ideas in its reform. That same day, the professor's Kharkiv apartment received an international phone call. The distinguished pianist Vladimir Horowitz was calling his older sister from the United States : "Regina, your husband has become famous!"
THE LAST SUCCESSFUL FIVE-YEAR PLAN
Brezhnev's first congress adopted the eighth five-year plan for the country's socioeconomic development, which proved remarkably realistic. Never in the post-war years had growth rates been so high. Over five years, national income increased by 42%, gross industrial output by 51%, and agricultural output by 21%.
It was then that the country's unified energy system was created and industrial oil production began in the Tyumen region. This was the first step toward a hydrocarbon addiction that led to economic stagnation.
But the facilities commissioned in those years are still operating today. These include the Bratsk and Krasnoyarsk hydroelectric power plants, the first phase of VAZ, and many other giant enterprises. The country, which had experienced a bread shortage in 1963, could boast of fully stocked stores for the first time in many years.
By the end of the five-year plan, the Kosygin-Lieberman reform was running out of steam. The number of regulatory targets issued by central agencies increased sharply. Enterprise autonomy was curtailed everywhere, and by the mid-1970s, the country had become fully familiar with shortages and queues. It wasn't perestroika-era publicists who were the first to speak of stagnation.
"Nothing remains, everything has collapsed. The reforms have fallen into the hands of people who don't want them at all. And I no longer expect anything..." Kosygin bitterly remarked to his Czechoslovakian counterpart, Lubomír Štrougal. The reforms were "unpaused" in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed "acceleration of socio-economic development," unaware of the consequences of his good intentions.
[CNN] A hacker has allegedly stolen a massive trove of sensitive data – including highly classified defense documents and missile schematics – from a state-run Chinese supercomputer in what could potentially constitute the largest known heist of data from China.
The dataset, which allegedly contains more than 10 petabytes of sensitive information, is believed by experts to have been obtained from the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Tianjin – a centralized hub that provides infrastructure services for more than 6,000 clients across China, including advanced science and defense agencies.
Cyber experts who have spoken to the alleged hacker and reviewed samples of the stolen data they posted online say they appeared to gain entry to the massive computer with comparative ease and were able to siphon out huge amounts of data over the course of multiple months without being detected.
An account calling itself FlamingChina posted a sample of the alleged dataset on an anonymous Telegram channel on February 6, claiming it contained “research across various fields including aerospace engineering, military research, bioinformatics, fusion simulation and more.”
The group alleges the information is linked to “top organizations” including the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, and the National University of Defense Technology.
Cyber security experts who have reviewed the data say the group is offering a limited preview of the alleged dataset, for thousands of dollars, with full access priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Payment was requested in cryptocurrency.
CNN cannot verify the origins of the alleged dataset and the claims made by FlamingChina, but spoke with multiple experts whose initial assessment of the leak indicated it was genuine.
The alleged sample data appeared to include documents marked “secret” in Chinese, along with technical files, animated simulations and renderings of defense equipment including bombs and missiles.
“They’re exactly what I would expect to see from the supercomputing center,” said Dakota Cary, a consultant at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne who focuses on China and has reviewed the samples placed online from the alleged hack.
“You would use supercomputer centers for large computational tasks. The swath of samples that the sellers put out kind of really speaks to the breadth of customers that this supercomputing center had,” Cary said.
Most of those customers would have little reason to maintain their own supercomputing infrastructure independently, he added.
INTELLIGENCE VALUE
The Tianjin center — the first of its kind in China when it opened in 2009 — is one of several supercomputing hubs located in major cities including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Chengdu.
According to Marc Hofer, a cybersecurity researcher and author of the blog NetAskari, the size of the dataset would make it attractive to adversarial state intelligence services.
“Only they probably have the capacity to work through all this data and come back with something useful.”
To put the scale in perspective: one petabyte equals 1,000 terabytes, and a high-spec laptop typically holds around one terabyte.
“There are leaks from China’s cyber ecosystem that I’m familiar with that have sold very quickly,” Cary told CNN. “I’m sure that there are plenty of governments globally that are interested in some of the data at the NSCC, but many of those governments that are interested also may already have the data.”
HOW DID THE HACKER GAIN ACCESS?
Hofer, who reviewed the sample of the leak, said he was able to contact on Telegram a person who claimed they had carried out the hack. The attacker claimed to have gained access to the Tianjin supercomputer through a compromised VPN domain.
Once inside, the attacker told Hofer they deployed a “botnet” — a network of automated programs that were able enter the NSCC’s system and then extract, download and store the data. The extraction of 10 petabytes of data took around six months.
Courtesy of badanov:
🚨 BREAKING: HACKER CLAIMS MASSIVE CHINESE MILITARY DATA BREACH
A hacker known as “FlamingChina” says they accessed a major Chinese supercomputer and stole sensitive military data.
Leaked samples appear authentic, according to cybersecurity experts.
#1
10 petabytes? Assuming it really _is_ sensitive stuff, I'd bet that a large chunk of that is test data, and not very useful without knowing the testing configuration and calibration.
Posted by: James the lesser ||
04/09/2026 15:39 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Given the current popularity of AI, my SWAG is they grabbed a lot of training data and model weights. Possibly useful, possibly not.
[FoxBusiness] The 11-state region has absorbed 70% of all U.S. population growth in the last five years, governors say
A new economic iron curtain is falling across America as the "Boom Belt" — an 11-state powerhouse in the U.S. Southeast — shatters records and challenges the traditional financial dominance of New York and Chicago.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott joined forces in Miami on Tuesday to celebrate a $9 trillion gross domestic product (GDP) region that is now outpacing every other quadrant of the country in population, jobs and capital investment.
Texas is not in the Southeast. Do they just mean the South?
"I often tell people, as Governor of Florida, my job is to closely follow California, Illinois, New York, so I can do precisely the opposite of what they do," DeSantis said during the panel held at the Pérez Art Museum.
Ouch.
"Florida's had more adjusted gross income move into our state since I've been governor than has ever moved into any state in the history of the United States."
"Visionary business leaders seek to where not the puck is right now, but to where it is going... while other regions where the puck has been in the past, they're now burdened by high taxes, by restrictive regulations, by policies that are actually hostile to businesses," Abbott added.
And they’re happy about it, and want to do more, which is the queerest thing.
The governors spotlighted how Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas now generate $9 trillion in annual GDP, trailing only the U.S. and China globally, while absorbing 70% of all U.S. population growth in the last five years.
Is that after reversing illegal immigration? Or is reversal still to come?
The migration has been fueled by more than just sunshine; it is a tactical retreat from a wave of tax-the-rich proposals sweeping through blue-state legislatures including California, New York and now Washington.
"We're in the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. The founding fathers, they wanted a system based on the consent of the government… They wanted to have a rule of law and they wanted some of this stuff, particularly private property, to not just be subjected to those types of whims," DeSantis said.
"Hence, in Texas, even though we have never had a state income tax, we wanted to make sure that future generations would not be able to impose an income tax, so we made income taxes unconstitutional in the state of Texas," Abbott said. "We made a wealth tax unconstitutional. We made a death tax unconstitutional, and as [TXSE's] Jim Lee pointed out, we made a transactions tax unconstitutional."
"I know that there's been a lot of very healthy competition between states like Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Georgia, some of these. And I think that's really, really good," DeSantis noted. "When Greg's doing stuff, people say, ‘Look [at] what Texas just did.’"
SEC Chairman Paul Atkins and TXSE CEO Jim Lee warned that the U.S. has lost half of its public companies over the last 30 years because the federal government made it "complicated, expensive and legally treacherous" to go public.
"When capital, companies and people all move in the same direction, with that kind of consistency and at that kind scale, it behooves us to ask why. I believe that the answer, more often than not, is the region's steady adherence to first principles, including those that rigorously protect investors without needlessly paralyzing companies," Atkins said. "So for our part, the SEC is returning to those same principles by renewing the conditions that make our public markets the natural destination for companies to raise capital and for investors to share in their success."
"As Chairman Atkins has remarked repeatedly, it used to be cool to be public, so what happened? The answer is we made it complicated, expensive and legally treacherous to be a public company. Remaining private became the only rational choice. This is not a coincidence. It is a consequence," Lee emphasized.
As someone who helped lead the firm’s move from Chicago to Miami, Citadel Securities President Jim Esposito highlighted the practical, bottom-line reasons why the "Boom Belt" is winning the war for capital — framing the Southern governing style as an inspiration for the rest of America.
"Across Florida, Texas and other high-growth states, government officials have created environments where businesses can operate, invest. And importantly, grow with confidence," he said. "This type of public and private partnership should be the model for the rest of our country."
[It's Kurt] Give Donald Trump credit for his ambition — he’s not only taking out America’s longstanding enemies, but he’s redefining the entire post-war world order. No biggie — he’s just changing everything about the world that we all grew up in. But we’re conservatives, so when you change something, you generally need to demonstrate a good reason to do so. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, and so on. But the old order was broken. Disastrously so. The behavior of the formerly great Western European powers during this existential struggle against the Muslim Marxist murder mullahs — the Iranian government is shockingly super-deep into faculty lounge campus communism (listen here) — only confirms it. Trump didn’t cause this reality; Trump saw this reality and acted, thereby becoming the most consequential president since Ronald Reagan.
Yes, his actions are destroying the world order as we knew it and grew up with, but not all destruction is bad. There’s creative destruction, where you clear out the deadwood and the inflammable underbrush that could fuel an inferno. That’s what Donald Trump’s doing. And that’s what the old version of NATO has been trying to stop. Remember the classic formulation of NATO’s role: keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. Well, the Germans aren’t getting up anytime soon. They’re too busy hamstringing themselves. They’ve ensured that they can’t rely on their own energy generation by closing down their nukes and buying fuel from their enemies. And they’ve imported a third-world fifth column both out of existential guilt and the desperate need to make up for the birth dearth among the broken and exhausted people of their country. Germany is dying, and a majority of Germans believe it should. As for the Russians, until they invaded Ukraine, they had become merely a hypothetical threat since the end of the Cold War. That’s why the Bundeswehr was not too long ago practicing maneuvers with broomsticks; it couldn’t rustle up an armor division to save its life, literally.
NATO’s other role was to keep the Americans in, but also to keep them down. Yeah, they wanted America there, carrying the bulk of the defense of Western Europe, spending massive amounts of money on bases and infrastructure — those of us who were stationed in Germany are fully aware of how much American cash energized the local economy. But NATO membership implies multilateralism, that we Americans weren’t going to do anything big without our allies. And this gave our allies a tremendous ability to keep us in check. Remember that the entire post-war foreign policy system was not simply about keeping the Russians at bay. It was also designed to control the Americans. Allowing countries like Cuba to continue to plague us, enforcing international law that only serves to limit American action, and tying America to operating with allies all acted as a brake on the USA’s pursuit of its own interests. This was a feature for the globalists, not a bug.
But Trump wasn’t going to play that. Trump wasn’t interested in having America’s interests held in check by foreigners and by America’s own foreign policy establishment. Remember, their ideology eschews parochial patriotism. Their primary loyalty is not to the United States — why do you think Secretary of State George Shultz would bring a new ambassador, point to a globe, and ask them to find their country, with the right answer being the USA? Many of the Foggy Bottom types failed that test.
Opponents try to portray Trump as crazy or even treacherous because he refuses to adhere to the old world order, but Trump’s patriotism is actual patriotism. He sees foreign policy not as an academic exercise or a necessary effort to keep those dumb, greedy Americans under control, but as a business in which it is natural to use one’s strengths to one’s advantage. Just look at the tariffs issue — before he came along, did you realize just how unfavorable our tariff deals were to the United States? The New York City real estate developer can’t conceive of a reason why we would accept less than whatever we are strong enough to take.
One of the things that made the old world order work was that NATO could seize the moral high ground, in the sense that the Western powers were the good guys and that it was worth the costs imposed on the United States to protect like-minded democracies. But as their culturally, socially, and politically exhausted ruling classes clung to power long after change had become overdue, they lost that moral high ground. In Great Britain and Germany, you can be arrested for saying things. Why again are we promising to put blood and treasure on the line to defend countries that don’t recognize free speech from... a country that doesn’t recognize free speech?
Nor did it help that, for generations, the Europeans have blatantly failed to carry their weight within the alliance. America picked up the rucksack, and they picked up purses. The formerly great powers allowed their militaries to wither to such an extent that, even if they were inclined to assist the United States in the current conflict, they couldn’t meaningfully do so. The front-line states are different. The Finns and the Poles can fight, but they lack the luxury of frivolity that the UK, France, and Germany share. They look across the border and see Russians. The UK, France, and Germany invite in a bunch of Third World barbarians and tell themselves they are our moral superiors. We’ve been telling them for decades they’ve got to pick up the pace, that we can’t subsidize their Third World welfare states by allowing them to outsource their defense to our wallet. And they haven’t listened. In fact, they’ve laughed at us. That is, until Ukraine, and they expect us to fix that, too.
Shaming them are other allies that actually do perform. Look at Japan, which is picking up its responsibilities in the Western Pacific. And, of course, there’s Israel, which is actively integrated into the Iranian campaign. It’s fighting as an American peer. No NATO country can do that. No NATO country can even come close to doing that. Little Israel provides more raw combat power, not to mention technological, cyber, and intelligence dominance, than all the other countries of NATO combined. No other NATO country could pull off the great F-15 recovery mission; the ship on the upcoming Townhall cruise will generate more combat power alone than most NATO navies.
Posted by: Grom the Affective ||
04/09/2026 05:37 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...King of England, Scotland, Ireland -- at least part of it -- Wales, Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, and places like that. The first King Chuck had his head chopped off, the second one was Good Time Charlie. The third once wanted to be a tampon and thinks we'll all be extinct within the next seven years...
