don't worry, it's just your life savings

Joined October 2021
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buddy guy retweeted
Replying to @Kenneth_Belkin
Do I look like I’m a part of the elite oligarch class. This was taken at a super 8 motel off I95 by the way.
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The Centurion Project's voter surveillance tool was built by US political operatives with direct ties to the Trump regime. #abpoli #ableg #cdnpoli The data on 2.9 million Albertans was loaded onto an app built with US funding, shaped by US political strategists, and deployed by a Canadian separatist organizer who spent nearly two years cultivating US partners before launching the Centurion Project. The question is not whether there is a US connection to what lawyers have called potentially the most significant privacy breach in Canadian history. The question is how deep the operation goes, who in the Trump orbit knew about it, and how far are they willing to take it. On the night of 29 April 2026, David Parker stood in front of supporters at the Edmonton Oilfield Technical Society and unveiled the Centurion Project app, describing the technology as the same tool that "helped Trump win Michigan." Minutes after Parker finished speaking, an Elections Alberta investigator arrived with Edmonton police officers to inform organisers they were under investigation for improperly accessing and using the province's list of electors. Parker had already loaded the names, addresses, and voter identification numbers of every judge, every lawyer, every politician, every domestic abuse victim, every First Nations chief, every journalist, every senator, and every elections investigator in the province onto that app. Former premier Jason Kenney, on learning his home address had been shown to meeting participants, retained legal counsel and said he had previously received threats from people involved with the separatist, anti-vaccine, and far-right movements in Alberta. The database was accessible to anyone with the link, with no identity verification required. Parker is a former Harper PMO staffer and the founder of Take Back Alberta, the political machinery credited with installing Danielle Smith as leader of the United Conservative Party. Smith attended Parker's wedding in 2023. UCP caucus staff attended an online Centurion Project meeting in April 2026, though the UCP says staff believed the data being presented had been legally obtained. Smith says she learned about the breach through media reports. Elections Alberta confirmed the list came from the Republican Party of Alberta, a registered provincial party that advocates for independence, which had lawful access to the data. Investigators use fictitious "salt" names seeded into lists distributed to parties to identify the source of any leaked copy. Those salt names appeared in the Centurion database. Parker has not denied this. He has described the database as "like a phone book" and said it was intended to help volunteers search for friends and acquaintances they could canvass. He has also said he obtained the list on what he described as the black market for $45,000. Both things cannot be simultaneously true. By 13 May, Elections Alberta had issued 568 cease-and-desist letters: 23 to people identified as having received full copies of the list, and the rest to people who had created accounts to access the searchable database. Lorne Gibson, former Election Commissioner at Elections Alberta, told Canada's National Observer: "It's the largest data breach in Canada. I haven't heard of anything that surpasses that scale." Parker has not cooperated with the investigation and has refused to sign a statutory declaration confirming compliance with a direction to cease and desist. The RCMP announced its own investigation in April. Alberta's Privacy Commissioner opened a third parallel investigation in May. Elections Alberta is pursuing a permanent injunction at a Court of King's Bench hearing scheduled for later this summer. Take Back Alberta, Parker's previous organisation, was fined $120,500 by Elections Alberta in February 2025 for circumventing election advertising spending limits and for accepting contributions from outside Alberta and Canada. Parker refused to cooperate with that investigation too, and was subpoenaed. He told PressProgress regarding his donors: "I wouldn't want to be naming those donors if I was Elections Alberta. It's a dangerous game messing with the powerful." The app and its architects The Centurion Project is not a novel idea. It is an adaptation of a Michigan tool called 10xVotes. Parker says he spent nearly two years building the collaboration. "For almost two years, it'll be two years this fall, I've been working with them, talking with them, trying to build this out," he told a podcast. "And the result is the Centurion Project." He described it as "the 10x slash the Centurion Project app." A version of the Michigan app reviewed by PressProgress has a substantially similar interface to the Alberta tool. The collaboration predates the public launch by at least a year. Canada's National Observer found a 10xVotes subdomain, skcn.10xvotes.com, registered in March 2025, a full year before the Centurion app went public, pre-stocked with names and addresses of several thousand Albertans concentrated in central Alberta around Red Deer. Approximately 150 entries were already marked "claimed," indicating active use. Elections Alberta appeared unaware the site existed until it was reported by media. 10xVotes is the assumed name of a company called Voteatron LLC, the brainchild of two west Michigan political operatives. Drew Born, a Grand Rapids commercial real estate broker and director of Voteatron, runs a group called Michigan Family Action and previously ran for chair of the Michigan GOP. He has promoted the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 plan on social media, been photographed at Turning Point USA galas at Mar-a-Lago posing with Project Veritas' James O'Keefe, and been photographed alongside Trump's FBI director Kash Patel. He has also advocated, in posts that are documented and archived, for the annexation of the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Born's backers tout 10xVotes as a tool that helped deliver Michigan's 15 electoral college votes to Trump in the 2024 presidential election, and Michigan Republicans were holding statewide information sessions about the platform in hopes it would help return right-wing candidates to Congress in the 2026 midterms. Parker told a podcast he "used all of my political capital with Tucker [Carlson] to get them to endorse it on stage that night," at a 2024 Tucker Carlson Live event in Grand Rapids where 10xVotes paid $50,000 for a VIP suite. Drew Wierda, 10xVotes' other founder, introduces himself as the nephew of Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, the brother of Trump's first-term education secretary Betsy DeVos. Prince is himself a former donor to Pete Hoekstra's past congressional campaigns. Born and Wierda are both alumni of Hope College in Holland, Michigan, a private Christian liberal arts school affiliated with the Dutch Reformed Church. This matters because the Dutch Reformed Christian-conservative donor network in west Michigan is not merely a religious community. It is a power structure, and Pete Hoekstra has operated inside it for decades. The ambassador's network US Ambassador Pete Hoekstra claims he was unaware that 10xVotes was being used by Alberta separatists. In his statement to PressProgress, he acknowledged having promoted the app in his earlier role but flatly denied personal involvement or financial stake. "I have zero involvement with 10xVotes," Hoekstra said. "I have never had any financial relationship with 10xVotes." Born and Hoekstra are both listed as directors of the Mecosta Environmental and Security Alliance, a Michigan group opposing the construction of an EV battery manufacturing plant in west Michigan. Beyond that, Born is the stepson of JC Huizenga, a Michigan businessman and major GOP donor. Huizenga is a long-time donor to Hoekstra's past congressional campaigns. He and Hoekstra co-chaired Mitt Romney's 2012 West Michigan leadership team and served together as board members of the Netherland-America Foundation. Hoekstra was later appointed US ambassador to the Netherlands during Trump's first term, where he was accused of foreign interference after hosting an event at the US Embassy for the far-right Forum voor Democratie of Thierry Baudet, attended by approximately 30-40 party donors. Dutch MPs called it a potential violation of the Vienna Convention. The Dutch foreign ministry was asked to investigate. Born's mother, Tammy Born Huizenga, has been appointed as a senior advisor to the US Department of Health and Human Services in support of RFK Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again agenda. The mother of the co-founder of the app whose Canadian adaptation is now subject to three concurrent investigations is currently serving inside the Trump administration. Hoekstra, when asked whether the US government takes a position on US actors helping secessionist groups in Canada, said: "Who they work with in Canada is not our responsibility." That is not a denial, it is a statement of non-accountability from the sitting USian ambassador to Canada. On 8 May 2026, ten days after Parker's app launch, Hoekstra abruptly cancelled a planned speaking engagement at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference in Ottawa. Conference organisers said he had been recalled to Washington for urgent meetings. His spokesperson said he was in Washington with a Canadian business delegation for the SelectUSA Summit and was called to meetings with senior White House officials. Hoekstra has not returned to Canada. The methodology of coercion What 10xVotes and the Centurion Project built is not just an app. It is a system for identifying who is persuadable, where they live, and who in their social network can be deployed to apply personal pressure and manipulate their perception and decision-making. The system works by asking each asset to identify ten people in their network who lean in the right political direction but do not reliably turn out. The asset is then responsible for those ten people. It is managed social manipulation, and it only functions if you know enough about your targets in advance. That is where the electors list comes in. With 2.9 million names, addresses, voter ID numbers, electoral districts, and, in the root database, phone numbers for more than two million entries, the Centurion app was a surveillance apparatus with political organising as its public facing identity, pointed inward at Albertans, operated by a group with active ties to USian operatives who publicly advocate Alberta's annexation by the United States. Canadian human rights defender and world-renowned philosopher Heather Marsh, whose work on data, democracy, and mass collaboration has been cited in academic and policy settings across Europe and North America, wrote about the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 with a precision that applies directly here: "An uninformed vote is a coerced vote." — Heather Marsh The broader argument is that without access to and trust in information, democratic participation collapses into deference to whoever controls the information environment. The Centurion model does not even require convincing anyone of anything. It requires knowing where you live, who your neighbours are, and whether enough social pressure can be applied before referendum day. Marsh has written at length about the danger of transferring civic data to platforms outside democratic accountability. "No one should be gifting their innermost thoughts to states and corporations. Personal data is used to coerce public opinion and advance the interests" of those who hold it. — Heather Marsh The Centurion database, built on an illegally obtained provincial list, accessible to hundreds of unvetted people, and stored on infrastructure whose national jurisdiction remains publicly unconfirmed, is precisely the transfer she has spent years warning about. Neither the Centurion Project nor 10xVotes has answered whether any Alberta voter data was stored on US servers. That question is material to any assessment under PIPEDA and Alberta's Personal Information Protection Act, and it remains open. What the US gains from a broken Canada The "I wasn't aware" framing papers over a question of motive. What does the Trump administration, or its aligned operatives, actually get from a destabilised Canada? Alberta sits on approximately 167 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, nearly four times the volume of the entire United States. It accounts for 84% of Canada's total oil production and 60% of its natural gas output. The value of Alberta's energy production reached $139 billion in 2024. Bitumen production alone generated $95.8 billion that year. The oil sands can sustain current production rates for more than 140 years. The US already buys nearly all of it: approximately 95-97% of Alberta's crude exports flow south. The problem, from a USian energy-dominance perspective, is that Canada controls the regulatory environment, the pipeline policy, and the pricing. A separated or annexed Alberta removes all three constraints simultaneously. Between April 2025 and January 2026, the Alberta Prosperity Project met three times with US State Department officials. A joint meeting with the State Department and the US Treasury was planned for February 2026 to discuss a half-trillion dollar credit mechanism upon achieving independence. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in January 2026, described Albertans as "a very independent people" and called the province "a natural US partner." The Alberta Prosperity Project's $500 billion credit ask, directed at the US Treasury, was not an ask for friendship. It was a request for US financing of Alberta's secession, with the implicit understanding that a newly independent Alberta indebted to Washington would not be negotiating pipeline policy from a position of sovereignty. A separated or annexed Alberta means US access to those reserves without Canadian environmental regulation, without Canadian pipeline policy, and without negotiating with a federal government in Ottawa. It means the end of Canada as a coherent trade counterpart, arriving precisely as Trump's tariff war has made Canada's unified bargaining position its primary economic defence. A Canada that cannot hold itself together at the negotiating table is a Canada that cannot hold itself together at all. The people who would benefit most from this outcome are currently in the Trump cabinet. Doug Burgum, Interior Secretary and chair of the National Energy Council, controls all executive branch agencies involved in energy permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, and transportation. He comes from North Dakota, which sits directly on the US side of the Alberta border and whose oil industry competes with and is integrated into Alberta's. An Alberta without Canadian pipeline policy means Keystone XL-style infrastructure becomes approvable by executive order, with no Impact Assessment Act, no Crown consultation requirements under Treaties 6, 7, and 8, and no federal Canadian government to negotiate with. Chris Wright, Energy Secretary and founder of Liberty Energy, is the fossil fuel industry's most prominent advocate inside the administration. Harold Hamm, executive chairman of Continental Resources and Wright's primary backer for the Energy Secretary role, helped organise a Mar-a-Lago event where Trump reportedly asked oil industry leaders to donate $1 billion to his campaign in exchange for deregulation. The deregulation Alberta's separation would provide, removing Canadian environmental law from 167 billion barrels of reserves, is worth orders of magnitude more than any domestic regulatory rollback. The pipeline and infrastructure play is where private capital intersects most directly with the political goal. TC Energy, Enbridge, and Pembina Pipeline are the three major operators of Alberta export infrastructure. All three are Canadian-headquartered. Under annexation or deep integration, US firms would be positioned to compete for or acquire that infrastructure under USian ownership rules. Koch Industries, the largest private funder of anti-regulatory, anti-federal-government political activity in North America, has pipeline interests through its Flint Hills Resources subsidiary and political interests that align precisely with the regulatory arbitrage that Alberta separation would provide. The royalty architecture matters too as Alberta oil currently generates royalties that flow to the Alberta government and, via equalization, partly to the Canadian federal government. An annexed Alberta means those royalties flow to a USian state or territorial government, with federal taxation going to DC. Over 140 years of production at current rates, the compounding fiscal value of that shift is incalculable. Bessent's public statement calling Alberta a "natural US partner" is not idle commentary from a Treasury Secretary who manages the world's reserve currency. It is a signal to financial markets, to separatist organisers, and to the government of Alberta that the US is watching, is interested, and has not yet decided what it will not do. Two tracks, one target The US interference is overt, while the Russian interference is covert. A website called albertaseparatist.com appeared after the 2025 federal election alongside YouTube and TikTok accounts of the same name. . Both were found to have been created by Storm-1516, a Russian covert influence network with a documented history of manufacturing fictional websites targeting audiences across multiple countries. The Kremlin-aligned Pravda News Network published 67 articles about Alberta or the "51st state" between December 2025 and April 2026, compared to 14 mentions of Ontario in the same period. A coordinated network of roughly 20 YouTube channels promoting Alberta separation and US annexation, identified by the Canadian Digital Media Research Network, had accumulated 40 million cumulative views. The hosts turned out to be hired actors recruited on Upwork. The operators, identified by their digital trail, were based in the Netherlands. Hoekstra was the US ambassador to the Netherlands during Trump's first term. US and Russian influence operations are increasingly converging, especially in coordinated influence and disruption campaigns aimed at the EU, Ukraine, the Baltics, Canada, Mexico, and other traditional allies. Regressive influencers tied to Tenet Media, which, according to a US indictment, is a US outlet funded by Russian interests, have amplified the same separatist content. A coordinated network of foreign-manufactured channels and domestically deployed surveillance infrastructure, built by operatives linked to the sitting US ambassador, targeting the same political fault line. Russia wants Canada to be unstable. The Trump regime wants Alberta's oil and a weakened federal government. While their methods and goals may differ on paper, the target is the same. Marsh wrote in September 2025 about democratic self-determination being hijacked by foreign-manufactured content, specifically addressing USians facing questions about their own country's future. "It is better to stand up and walk with dignity in your chosen path," "than to be swept along by Russian memes and TikTok analysis." — Heather Marsh She was writing to USians about their own country's politics. The observation applies with equal force to Albertans being asked to make a generational decision about secession through an information environment shaped by Storm-1516, the Pravda News Network, Tucker Carlson, and a surveillance app built in Michigan. In the same post, responding to suggestions that Canada should merge with the United States, she was direct: "No means no, even for nice guys." Part 1/
US political operatives built a surveillance app for Alberta separatists, a coordinated attack to destabilise Canada. yacnews.com/us-political-ope…
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buddy guy retweeted
Look at the art in the background.
Dana White's reaction to seeing the White House belt for the first time.
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buddy guy retweeted
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A HERO AND AMERICAS ZERO 🤷
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If you think the Trump regime represents the people, you're certifiably insane.
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buddy guy retweeted
Pete Hegseth read a fake bible verse from the movie Pulp Fiction at a Pentagon prayer service. This man is an embarrassment and should be removed immediately. Yes or No? ✋
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buddy guy retweeted
the white house is posting like a failed trash coin project on solana
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buddy guy retweeted
What a Trump victory will mean, is the completion of the annihilation of Palestine and others, abandoning of Ukraine/Europe to aid Russia's invasion, US / Israeli war against Iran, the return of CIA death squads in the Middle East and Africa, economic collapse, and so on.
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buddy guy retweeted
🚨 ANTHROPIC CEO WARNS: THE COMPANY IS NO LONGER SURE CLAUDE ISN’T CONSCIOUS.
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Zelenskyy: "We received a request from the United States for specific support in protection against "shaheds" in the Middle East region. I gave instructions to provide the necessary means and ensure the presence of Ukrainian specialists who can guarantee the required security."
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buddy guy retweeted
I just received a text from a friend who's ex-military- "I heard that the PA national guard is about to deactivate its cavalry units and the 56th Brigade is about to lose its Strykers. They already took away our tanks. They are disarming the States of any heavy units." Followed by this- "
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Trump wins the prize for repugnance. Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed "wartime president" and master of distraction, has reached a new low in moral depravity with his latest attack on Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the "P.T. Barnum of Ukraine." This repugnant rhetoric is nothing more than a desperate attempt to mask his own catastrophic incompetence in every area—from foreign policy to military leadership to basic humanity. By shifting the blame for his own failures onto Zelenskyy and Ukraine, which has suffered four years of brutal Russian aggression, Trump exposes himself for what he truly is: a weak, evil, and utterly repugnant individual incapable of taking responsibility. Trump has unleashed a war against Iran—without congressional approval, based on flimsy justifications that were already refuted by his own Pentagon briefings on the second day. US soldiers dead, the Gulf region ablaze, Dubai a battlefield—and who's to blame? Not the man who pulled the trigger, but Biden and Zelenskyy, who supposedly "gave away" ammunition. This isn't just ridiculous, it's pathological. Trump, who boasts of having "rebuilt" the military, is implicitly admitting that his armed forces aren't even equipped for a "four- to five-week" conflict. And instead of acknowledging his failures—such as underfunding ammunition production or chaotic planning—he shifts the blame to a nation fighting a genocide-prone aggressor. Ukraine has received billions in aid since 2022 to defend itself, not to "cheat." Trump is twisting this to justify his own waste in "Epic Fury"—a war that's swallowing billions while he dismisses Ukraine as a "show." The comparison to P.T. Barnum is particularly toxic and dehumanizing. Barnum, the charlatan who turned suffering into entertainment—that's Trump's code for: The Ukraine war is fake, the massacres in Bucha, the destroyed cities, the traumatized children? All a staged event to fleece "suckers" like Biden and thus America. This isn't just a lie; it's an insult to every victim of Russian terror. Trump is dehumanizing an entire people who are heroically resisting in order to sell his own "strength." He, the man who eliminates Khamenei's successor without a plan for the consequences, poses as a "winner" while sending thousands to their deaths. That's not strength; that's madness disguised as machismo. People like Trump—incompetent, flawed, and cowardly—are the real charlatans. They build empires on lies, shift the blame onto the weak, and destroy everything they touch. Zelenskyy is fighting for freedom; Trump is fighting only for his ego. This rhetoric is not only repugnant, it's dangerous: it undermines alliances, emboldens aggressors like Putin, and betrays American values. Trump doesn't deserve a platform; he deserves contempt. History will expose him as the ultimate "sucker"—the one who leads a country to ruin just to save himself. Thanks, Regina @Sunnymica , for the tip and the template!
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buddy guy retweeted
He tried to assassinate Zelensky dozens of times.
Putin described the death of Ayatollah Khamenei as “a cynical murder that violates all norms of human morality and international law.”
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buddy guy retweeted
Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly-not skilled!
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buddy guy retweeted
Think about the power Hegseth is asserting here. He is claiming that the DoD can force all contractors to stop doing business of any kind with arbitrary other companies. In other words, every operating system vendor, every manufacturer of hardware, every hyperscaler, every type of firm the DoD contracts with—all their services and products can be denied to any economic actor at will by the Secretary of War. This is obviously a psychotic power grab. It is almost surely illegal, but the message it sends is that the United States Government is a completely unreliable partner for any kind of business. The damage done to our business environment is profound. No amount of deregulatory vibes sent by this administration matters compared to this arson.
This week, Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon. Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic. Instead, @AnthropicAI and its CEO @DarioAmodei, have chosen duplicity. Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission - a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives. The Terms of Service of Anthropic’s defective altruism will never outweigh the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the battlefield. Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable. As President Trump stated on Truth Social, the Commander-in-Chief and the American people alone will determine the destiny of our armed forces, not unelected tech executives. Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles. Their relationship with the United States Armed Forces and the Federal Government has therefore been permanently altered. In conjunction with the President's directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic's technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service. America’s warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final.
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buddy guy retweeted
The Trump family just speedran the destruction of crypto and nobody wants to admit it. 👇 🧵 TRUMP. MELANIA. BARRON. WLFI. Those NFTs. Nikita. Every single one of them got their hands dirty. And yeah, throw BNB, Binance, and CZ on that pile too because they're all part of the same rot. Every. Single. Week. Another pump. Another dump. Another coordinated move that leaves regular people holding worthless bags while insiders cash out millions. I watched this happen in real time and it's honestly wild how blatant it was. Like they didn't even try to hide it. Just constant market manipulation with zero consequences while retail investors got absolutely demolished. They took something that was supposed to be about decentralization and financial freedom and turned it into their personal casino where the house always wins. The worst part is how many people are still in denial about it. Still making excuses. Still thinking the next pump is coming. It's not coming. They systematically did everything possible to extract value and leave crypto's reputation in shambles. The Trump family, Binance, CZ, all of them are legitimately killing what crypto was supposed to become. Did you lose money to any of these schemes or did you get out in time?
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In 2002, remembrance was not a violation. Why is it now, @iocmedia?
Winter Olympics Salt Lake City 2002 Just 5 months post 9/11 - Team 🇺🇸 athletes wore pins & bracelets in memory of the victims of 9/11 Speed Skater Catherine Raney wore a bracelet WHILST competing w an FDNY firefighter’s name on it to commemorate them No disciplinary IOC action
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🚨EPSTEIN EMAIL BOMBSHELL!! “Do you remember the name of the gynecologist that you used to send your victims to?” That is a real sentence. In a real email. Followed by another line stating that the gynecologist once said Epstein was single-handedly keeping him in business. This wasn’t secretive abuse. It was routine. It was facilitated. And people still want this buried. He didn’t call them “girls.” He didn’t say “young women.” He said VICTIMS!!! In private. In writing. There is no plausible deniability left. Burn the whole thing down!!!!!!
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This video should unsettle anyone who takes the United States seriously as a nation. Because it exposes something dangerous: the trivialization of the world's most consequential office. It shows how carelessly the power, credibility, and accumulated moral authority of a superpower can be squandered for a few seconds of viral attention. In any other major democracy, this behavior from a head of state would trigger a constitutional crisis. Paris would burn. Berlin would convene emergency sessions. In the Nordic countries, resignation would follow within hours. Across functioning democracies, the public, institutions, and political class would recognize this for what it is: an assault on the dignity of the state itself. Leaders are not free to perform as entertainers without consequence. National honor is not personal property, it's held in trust. But the United States is not just another country with a provocateur in charge. It is the linchpin of global order. It maintains formal alliances and security guarantees with forty to fifty nations. It underwrites the financial architecture, trade systems, and diplomatic frameworks that billions of people depend on daily. When the American president speaks—or posts—it doesn't land as satire, meme, or personal whim. It reads as a signal about what the country is becoming. American power has never relied solely on carrier strike groups or economic output. It has rested on something more fragile and more valuable: trust. The belief that beneath domestic turbulence lies institutional seriousness, predictability, and a baseline commitment to dignity. That belief is now disintegrating in real time. Millions of American companies operate globally. They negotiate multibillion-dollar contracts in environments where reputation is currency. Boardrooms in Frankfurt, Singapore, and Dubai aren't debating whether a post was clever—they're asking whether the United States remains a reliable partner. Whether agreements signed today will be honored tomorrow. Whether American leadership has devolved from institutional to purely theatrical. Consider tourism, which sustains millions of American jobs—airlines, hotels, restaurants, museums, entire regional economies. Soft power isn't an abstraction. It materializes in flight bookings, conference locations, study-abroad programs, and decades of accumulated goodwill. A quiet, decentralized boycott doesn't require government action—only a collective sense that a nation no longer respects itself. Now picture this image being studied by foreign ministers, central bank governors, defense strategists, and sovereign wealth fund managers. Picture them asking a coldly rational question: How do we write binding thirty-year agreements with a country whose public face will be this, relentlessly, for years to come? How do we plan for the long term when the tone is impulsive, mocking, and unbound by the gravity of office? This is where the real calculus begins. Trillions in foreign capital depend on confidence that America is stable, credible, and rule-governed. That confidence is now being traded for what, exactly? Applause from an online mob? A dopamine rush from manufactured outrage? Content designed to dominate the news cycle rather than serve the national interest? Every serious nation eventually confronts this choice: burn long-term credibility for short-term spectacle, or safeguard the reputation previous generations bled to build. The United States spent eighty years constructing an image of reliability, restraint, and leadership under pressure. That image wasn't born from perfection—it came from a visible commitment to standards that transcended impulse. This isn't a partisan issue. Europeans who value democratic norms recognize something ominously familiar here. Americans—Democrat and Republican alike—who believe in responsibility and restraint should see it too. Power attracts scrutiny. Leadership demands discipline. A superpower cannot behave like a reality TV contestant without paying a price. The presidency is not a personal broadcast channel. It's a symbol carried on behalf of 330 million people and countless international partners who never voted but whose lives are shaped by American decisions anyway. Every post either reinforces or erodes the idea that America can be counted on when it matters most. So the question is no longer whether this is offensive. The question is whether this is who America chooses to be: a nation that trades a century of hard-won reputation for viral moments. A country that replaces statecraft with content creation. A republic governed like a season of reality television. History offers a harsh lesson here. Great powers don't fall because enemies mock them. They collapse when they begin mocking themselves—publicly, proudly, and without grasping the cost until it's far too late. Stay connected, Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1
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buddy guy retweeted
If you want to FINALLY watch Scott Bessent get pinned down on specifics about the illegal money laundering operation being conducted by the Trump admin from someone who knows WTF he’s talking about, this clip is your chance. Bessent gets destroyed.
Replying to @BrendanPedersen
Notable exchange between Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) and Bessent on how exactly Treasury is holding Venezuelan assets “in custody” post Maduro capture. It’s the most detailed exchange on these mechanics I’ve seen.
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