I am the Senior Director of Congressional Replacement at AIPAC. That's not my official title. My official title is something with "government affairs" in it. But "Congressional Replacement" is what I do. When a member of Congress votes wrong on our line item, I build the operation that removes them. I have a budget. I have a timeline. I have a vendor stack. And I have a record you can verify: Jamaal Bowman, New York, removed 2024, cost $14.5 million. Cori Bush, Missouri, removed 2024, cost $8.5 million. Thomas Massie, Kentucky, removal scheduled May 20th 2026, budget $25.6 million. That's the most expensive House primary in American history. I consider it a bargain. Let me show you why. **I. The Vocabulary** The donors need Massie removed because he voted against our foreign aid appropriation. He was the sole Republican to oppose the Iron Dome Supplemental in 2021. The sole member of Congress, not sole Republican, sole member, to oppose a resolution affirming Israel's right to exist in 2023. He has voted against every foreign aid package for thirteen years. But you can't run ads in rural Kentucky that say "your congressman voted against sending your tax dollars to a foreign government and we'd like to correct that." Kentucky would elect him twice. So we needed a different word. The word is "disloyal." In 2014, voting against every spending bill was called fiscal conservatism. In 2019, it was called the Tea Party mandate. In 2026, it is called disloyalty to the President of the United States. I didn't change the votes. I changed the vocabulary. The President was happy to co-sign. He called Massie "the Worst Republican Congressman in History." He called him a "bum." He said "vote him out." We coordinated the timing. I wouldn't call it a product launch. But I wouldn't object if you did. **II. The Money** Here is how the budget breaks down. United Democracy Project, our super PAC, contributes $2.6 million. The Republican Jewish Coalition adds $4 million. MAGA KY, a PAC managed by Tim Murtaugh, Trump's 2020 communications director, spends $5.6 million. Christians United for Israel buys the billboards. The individual donors, Paul Singer, Miriam Adelson, John Paulson, route contributions through a platform called Democracy Engine. I need to explain Democracy Engine, because it's my favorite part of the operation. Democracy Engine is a multi-party donor aggregation platform. What it aggregates, specifically, is attribution. A contribution enters Democracy Engine from a hedge fund manager in Manhattan. It exits Democracy Engine as a line item on a campaign finance report in Covington, Kentucky. The money doesn't change. The origin story does. Paul Singer manages $69.7 billion from a tower on 57th Street in New York. Miriam Adelson's net worth was built in Las Vegas casinos. John Paulson's office is on Park Avenue. Between them, they have never cast a ballot in Kentucky's 4th congressional district. They cannot name the county seats. They do not need to. Democracy Engine translates their preferences into Kentucky's. The candidate himself, Ed Gallrein, retired Navy SEAL, Trump-endorsed, raised $1.3 million on his own. That's nine percent of the total pro-Gallrein spend of $14.3 million. Ninety-one percent of the money behind the "Kentucky values" candidate was contributed by people who do not live in Kentucky, have never lived in Kentucky, and whose primary policy interest is the foreign aid budget of a country eight thousand miles from Covington. I present this as a design feature, not a flaw. Why would you want a candidate who raises his own money? Self-funding indicates self-thinking. Self-thinking introduces variance. Variance is risk. We don't invest in risk. We invest in compliance. **III. The Product** Gallrein has no voting record. No legislative history. No published policy positions that could be held against him in a future cycle. His campaign website lists the words "conservative," "freedom," and "Kentucky" in that order. His policy page is a photograph of him in uniform. I don't say this as criticism. I say this as a specification sheet. The ideal replacement congressman in 2026 is a résumé with a compliance guarantee. Pre-tested messaging. Zero ideological fingerprints. $14.3 million in someone else's convictions loaded like firmware. You don't need positions when your donors have positions. You don't need a record when your record starts the day you take the oath. He will arrive in Washington owing his career to three billionaires and four organizations. He will know exactly which line item pays his mortgage. The median household income in Kentucky's 4th district is $63,000. Paul Singer's net worth is $6.7 billion. That is 106,349 Kentucky households. One man, in one Manhattan office tower, earning the combined annual income of every family in the district he is about to staff. I don't find this ironic. I find it efficient. **IV. The Threat** Now here is the part I don't discuss publicly, and the reason the budget is $25.6 million instead of $14.5 million. Bowman and Bush were expensive. But they were Democrats. The base case. Massie is more expensive because Massie is more dangerous. Not because he has more support. Because of what he introduced in the House. The AIPAC Act. Formally: the Americans Insist on Political Agent Clarity Act. It would amend the Foreign Agents Registration Act. FARA. The 1938 law Congress passed to counter Nazi propaganda operations. Massie's bill would require organizations that primarily advance the interests of a foreign government to register as foreign agents. He means us. If AIPAC were required to register under FARA, every dollar of our $25.6 million operation would require public disclosure of its foreign-interest origin. Every donor. Every routing. Every Democracy Engine transaction. Every call to every member's office. All of it, in a searchable federal database, labeled: foreign agent. The bill will not pass. Massie won't be in Congress to reintroduce it. That's not a prediction. That's a line item on the budget. We are not spending $25.6 million to replace a congressman. We are spending $25.6 million to eliminate a regulatory threat. The seat is a byproduct. The product is the precedent. **V. The Precedent** This is the part I present to donors as return on investment. There are 435 members of the House. Every one of them is watching Kentucky. Every one of them can see the math. Massie voted wrong on one appropriations line item, and a coalition spent $25.6 million, more than any House primary in American history, to end his career. The message is not complicated. You do not need to spend $25.6 million on every district. You need one example. One member, destroyed publicly, expensively, and completely. The other 434 learn. The cost per compliant vote, amortized across the full Congress, is $58,850. I consider that competitive. Bowman was the proof of concept. Bush was the replication. Massie is the expansion into the opposing party. Left, right. The mechanism doesn't care. The mechanism has a budget line, not a party. If you vote wrong, the budget finds you. If you try to make the budget visible, the budget finds you faster. The primary is Tuesday. The polls show 48 to 43. If we win, we will have demonstrated that no member of Congress, regardless of party, ideology, seniority, or constituent support, can survive voting against our appropriation. Not a progressive in the Bronx. Not a libertarian in Kentucky. Nobody. And when someone asks how a congressman elected by 478,000 Kentucky voters was removed by three billionaires from New York, Las Vegas, and Manhattan, the answer will be the same word we've been using since the beginning. Loyalty. We don't need to register as foreign agents. We register as loyal Americans. The distinction is $25.6 million and a vendor platform that makes one look like the other. Everything I just described is legal. I need you to understand that. Not "technically legal." Not "arguably legal." Legal. Fully, completely, structurally legal. That's the product. Not the congressman. Not the seat. Not even the vote. The product is a system where everything I just described is legal. And you just read the whole thing.

Let's talk about Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, and how he connects Jeffrey Epstein to the war with Iran that started today. Most covering today's strikes are focused on nuclear weapons. That's the frame the administration wants. There’s more to it. Who is Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem? He's an Emirati billionaire who ran DP World, the world's second-largest port company, operating in 80 countries and handling roughly 10% of all global container traffic. It is owned by the Dubai government. He's also the man Rep. Thomas Massie confirmed sent Jeffrey Epstein a torture video – "where are you? are you ok I loved the torture video.". The guy who has 4,700 file references and a relationship dating to at least 2007, continuing a decade past Epstein's 2008 conviction, right up to the day of Epstein's 2019 arrest. He resigned from DP World within days of being named. But the story doesn't end there. The Syrian Port and Bandar Abbas Port In 2015, bin Sulayem toured Iranian ports and told press on the record: "We are very interested in the Iranian market. With our ports in the Gulf, we need to go into Iran." Bandar Abbas: Iran's main port on the Strait of Hormuz that handles 85% of Iran's seaborne trade and sits at one of the most strategically valuable shipping chokepoints on earth. One fifth of the world's oil passes through that strait. The Islamic Republic was in the way of anyone trying to get in. He couldn't get Iran. So he got Syria first. When Assad fell in December 2024, Trump lifted US sanctions on Syria and met with the new government. Within months, bin Sulayem personally traveled to Damascus and signed an $800M, 30-year contract for Syria's Port of Tartus. DP World evicted the Russian operator and moved in by November 2025. Trump cleared the runway. The Epstein co-conspirator got the port. Now Iran Today Trump struck Iran, killed Khomenei, and announced he's aiming to "annihilate" the Iranian navy, which happens to be based at Bandar Abbas. The same port bin Sulayem said a decade ago he wanted. But before the bombs fell, there were negotiations. And the men sent to conduct them deserve scrutiny, both for who they are and for what was actually on the table. Jared Kushner - Trump's son-in-law, no official government position, no Senate confirmation, no oversight. After leaving his first White House role, his private equity firm received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund. Steve Witkoff - Trump's special envoy, real estate developer. Co-founded the Trump family's crypto venture World Liberty Financial with his sons and Trump family members. A UAE-backed firm invested $2 billion in that company. The UAE is the government that owns DP World. What Was Actually On The Table Iran, desperate to avoid military strikes, offered what sources described to the Financial Times as a "commercial bonanza" - “oil fields, gas reserves, mining contracts, and critical minerals — specifically directed at Trump”. They were offering to open their entire underdeveloped resource sector to American companies in exchange for sanctions relief. Think about who was sitting across the table from that offer. Two men financially tied to the Gulf states that profit most from Iranian infrastructure opening up. Kushner's Saudi backers. Witkoff's UAE backers, the government that owns DP World, the company that has been trying to get into Iranian ports since 2015. The talks failed anyway. Per the Wall Street Journal, Kushner and Witkoff presented Iran with conditions no sovereign country could realistically accept: destroy the three main nuclear sites, hand over the entire enriched uranium stockpile to the United States, and permanently abandon all enrichment forever with no sunset clauses. On the same day the envoys were in Geneva asking for a deal, the US Treasury announced new sanctions on Iranian entities. Iran called this openly contradictory. Witkoff and Kushner reportedly told Trump a deal was "difficult, if not impossible." Two days later, the war began. The question worth asking: were these demands designed to produce a deal, or designed to produce a justification for war? Because the men conducting the negotiations had financial ties to the governments that profit most from Iranian infrastructure opening up. And that outcome is the same whether Iran surrenders or Iran falls. So What Does This Have To Do With Epstein? Everything. People think the Epstein story is about a pedophile and his famous friends. That's the surface. Underneath it, Epstein was an access broker. His entire operation was built on one service: connecting powerful men to political leverage they couldn't buy directly. Look at what he did for bin Sulayem alone. He got him the personal email address of Britain's Business Secretary and coached him on how to use it. He introduced him to the Prime Minister of Israel. He advised him on whether to attend Trump's inauguration. In Epstein's own words, he was helping bin Sulayem find people who are "one of us." That phrase is the key to understanding what Epstein actually built. Not a client list. A network. Men who owed each other access, favors, and silence. Men who could open doors the public never sees. Bin Sulayem used that network to build a port empire and spend a decade trying to get into Iran. The Islamic Republic was in the way. Today the Islamic Republic is being bombed by an administration staffed with people from that same network. They’re conducting a war through envoys financially tied to the Gulf states that benefit most from Iran opening up. That's what the Epstein files reveal when you follow them past the headlines. Not just who flew on which plane or whose island they visited. But what that network of influence eventually produces in the real world. Whatever happened to Epstein, the network he built didn't go with him. The favors, the access, the men who owed each other things they couldn't discuss publicly. That apparatus is still running. It holds cabinet positions. It controls $10 billion in government contracts. It put two unconfirmed envoys in a room with Iran on behalf of interests they're financially tied to. The network is alive and the leaders operating inside it are still collecting on what he built. And when asked why he dropped conflict of interest rules from his first term, Trump answered on the record: "We did that in the first term and didn't get any credit for it. So in the second term, we're not even bothering." That's not a conspiracy theory. That's a quote from the president, ffs.

The Dubai government spent a decade trying to get into Iranian ports. Their man on that mission was Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, who was one of Epstein's closest friends. Today Iran is bombing Dubai. It makes sense.

As yet another preemptive war is begun in the Middle East, John Quincy Adam’s words of wisdom still ring true: “Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.” Like most Americans I have sympathy for the plight of the Iranian people and all subjected people around the globe, from North Korea to Tibet. But as Adam’s wrote, America:  “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” The Constitution conferred the power to declare or initiate war to Congress for a reason, to make war less likely.   Madison wrote that “the Executive Branch is the branch most prone to war, therefore, the Constitution, with studied care, delegated the war power to the legislature.” As with all war, my first and purest instinct is wish Americans soldiers safety and success in their mission.   But my oath of office is to the Constitution, so with studied care, I must oppose another Presidential war.

The "There’s an app for that" era is officially over. 💀 We’ve reached Peak App Fatigue. Users don’t want to manage 50 different icons, subscriptions, and notification badges anymore. They want outcomes, not interfaces. So, why build apps at all? Because the "App" is changing from a Destination to a Data Source. The New Stack: 1. The User: Expresses intent (e.g., "Book a flight to NYC and find a gym nearby with a squat rack.") 2. The AI Agent: The new OS. It navigates the web so the user doesn't have to. 3. The App: The specialized "worker" that provides the API, the logic, and the specific utility the AI needs to fulfill the request. We aren't building for human eyes anymore; we’re building for Machine Consumption. If your app doesn't have a robust API or "Agentic" compatibility, you aren't just losing users - you’re becoming invisible to the AI they use to run their lives. The purpose of building an app today isn't to steal 10 minutes of screen time. It’s to provide the most reliable, permissionless infrastructure for an AI to get the job done. 🏗️🤖

As in, the agent suffered internal bleeding after violently retching when he realized he murdered an innocent mother.

Let's see it.

Greg Maddux explains why Barry Bonds was the easiest hitter to pitch against 😂

OK, WHO DID THIS???🤣🤣🤣

Tony Gwynn is greatest pure hitter I've ever seen play the game of baseball.

2026 is going to be a big year!

He'll go down as the most bat shit crazy president ever but also, undeniably, the funniest.

Dan Marino Tony Gwynn Randy Moss Junior Seau LaDainian Tomlinson Barry Bonds

ethereum raised $18.3m built before crypto was even an industry shipped real decentralization 100% uptime despite dozens of upgrades, it has been running non-stop for 10 years, 4 months, and 15 days tvl: $97b total value secured on l2s: $37.8b home to the most used, real defi applications in crypto hosts over 50% of all circulating stablecoins on the l2 side, it has already reached ~32k tps, with a 100k tps mainnet roadmap ready the true home of tokenization the place where long-term plans are made instead of chasing temporary hypes and narratives the only truly neutral, high-economic-activity blockchain unlike foundations that dumped unknown amounts of tokens on retail and likely burned through their treasuries, ethereum has been transparent about its treasury for over a decade hosts over 80% of all rwas its etf became the 3rd fastest in history to reach $10b in assets institutions are building on ethereum and people like tom lee continue to accumulate eth the global settlement layer the world computer it’s sitting at a $377b fdv, roughly the same amount of capital that was wasted and burned by all the so-called competing l1s over the years so yes, it deserves far more moon that

Aave will be the backbone of all credit. - Mortgages - Credit card loans - Consumer loans - Business loans - Sovereign debt DeFi powering the real economy.