"I’m asking you to hold the line. Not because the President is infallible... he’s not, nobody is... but because the logic is sound. You cannot build a fortress of peace on a foundation of unresolved threats. You have to clear the ground first. That’s what’s happening." The question you have to ask... the honest question, not the Tucker question, not the Marjorie question, the real question... is this... Could Donald Trump have achieved a permanent, lasting America First posture... the real doctrine, the thing we all voted for... without first clearing the board of the existential threats that previous administrations allowed to metastasize for decades? The answer is no. And everybody who is being honest with themselves knows it’s no Let me take you through it, because the details matter. They always matter with this President. He doesn’t do anything by accident. People think he’s impulsive... the media loves that narrative, “Trump is impulsive, Trump is chaotic”... but look at the timeline. Look at how this actually played out. Venezuela: The Western Hemisphere First Trump didn’t wake up one morning and decide to grab Maduro. This was months in the making. Years, actually, if you go back to his first term, when the Justice Department indicted Maduro on narco-terrorism charges in March 2020. Nobody did anything about it then. The indictment just sat there. Biden recognized the opposition candidate Edmundo González as the legitimate president after the stolen 2024 election, and then did absolutely nothing about it. Nothing. Just a statement. Trump came back and started squeezing. Designated Tren de Aragua as a Foreign Terrorist Organization on Day One. Designated the Cartel of the Suns... which Maduro basically ran... as an FTO in July. Started a maritime blockade of sanctioned oil tankers in December 2025. And the whole time, by the way, he was offering Maduro off-ramps. Multiple off-ramps. Rubio was negotiating. There were back channels through Qatar. The Rodríguez siblings... Delcy and Jorge... were apparently trying to work out a deal where Maduro would go into exile. But Maduro wouldn’t go. He thought he could wait it out. He was wrong. January 2, 2026... the operation launched. Special forces went in under cover of night. Army Warrant Officer 5 Eric Slover flew the lead Chinook into Maduro’s military fortress. Eighty-three people died, including thirty-two Cuban soldiers who were stationed there... and by the way, what were Cuban soldiers doing in Venezuela? Think about that. Cuban soldiers protecting a Venezuelan dictator. That tells you everything about the network that had to be broken. Maduro is now in federal custody in New York. Delcy Rodríguez is the interim president, cooperating with our government. We’re marketing Venezuelan oil on global markets. The largest proven oil reserves on the planet... three hundred billion barrels, bigger than Saudi Arabia... are no longer being used to fund narco-terrorism and Cuban communism. They’re being used to benefit the American people and the Venezuelan people. Now. Was that regime change? Technically? Yes. But here’s the critical difference... and this is what separates what Trump did from what Bush did in Iraq, what Obama did in Libya, what the whole rotten establishment has done for twenty-five years. Trump did not invade Venezuela. He did not send a hundred and fifty thousand troops. He did not dissolve the Venezuelan state. He did not fire every government employee and disband the security forces like Paul Bremer did in Iraq, which was the single stupidest decision in the history of American foreign policy, by the way. Single stupidest decision. Created ISIS. Created the entire insurgency. Because they took a million armed, trained men, humiliated them, and set them loose with nothing to do but fight. Trump did the opposite. He took the head. Left the body. Made a deal with the body. That’s not nation-building. That’s not a forever war. That’s a surgical correction of a threat that had been allowed to fester for over two decades. Get in, remove the problem, arrange the pieces, get out. The Venezuelan state is still functioning. The military is still intact. The oil is flowing. And America is no longer dealing with a hostile narco-state in its own backyard. We’re not building schools in Caracas. We’re not training a Venezuelan national police force. We’re not spending a trillion dollars over ten years trying to turn Venezuela into Vermont. We’re leaving. That is the doctrine. But you can’t leave a problem you haven’t solved. Iran: The Nuclear Sword of Damocles Iran is the harder case, and I’ll be straight with you... it’s the one that bothers people the most, and I understand why. Because Iran looks like exactly what we said we wouldn’t do. It looks like Iraq 2003. It looks like the neocons got what they always wanted. John Bolton is happy. Bill Kristol is happy. When John Bolton and Bill Kristol are happy about something you did, you should be nervous. I get it. But Iran is not Iraq, and here is why. Iraq in 2003 was a contained threat. Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence was either wrong or fabricated. The threat was manufactured to justify a war that certain people in Washington wanted for ideological reasons that had nothing to do with American security. The entire premise was a lie. Iran in 2025-2026 was an uncontained, accelerating, existential threat. This is not debatable. After Biden let the JCPOA collapse without replacing it with anything... because Biden couldn’t negotiate his way out of a parking garage... Iran was enriching uranium to near-weapons-grade levels. The IAEA confirmed it. Four hundred kilograms of uranium enriched to sixty percent. They were, by every credible estimate, within weeks of breakout capability. The regime was simultaneously funding Hamas... which carried out October 7, the worst massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust... funding Hezbollah, funding the Houthis who were attacking global shipping in the Red Sea, and funding proxy wars across the entire Middle East. Trump tried diplomacy first. And this is the part that everyone who’s screaming “betrayal” conveniently forgets. He wrote a letter to Khamenei in March 2025 offering negotiations. He sent Steve Witkoff to Oman for multiple rounds of talks. Five rounds of talks. Five. Khamenei wouldn’t take the deal. They were offered sanctions relief, normalization, the whole package... in exchange for dismantling the nuclear program. They said no. They kept enriching. So in June 2025, during the Twelve-Day War with Israel, Trump sent B-2 bombers... seven of them, flying eighteen hours straight from Missouri... and dropped bunker-buster bombs on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. The three main enrichment sites. Obliterated. Set the program back years. And then he said... “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE.” And what did Iran do? They tried to rebuild. They kicked out the IAEA inspectors. They refused to let anyone verify what happened to their uranium stockpiles. They kept developing missiles. The regime... Khamenei specifically... made the calculation that he could outlast Trump, rebuild the program, and eventually get the bomb anyway. That calculation ended on February 28, 2026, when a precision strike killed Khamenei at his own residence during a meeting of senior officials. Gone. The defense minister, the IRGC commander, the secretary of the Security Council... all gone. Forty-eight senior leaders taken out, according to the President. And in the streets of Tehran... this is the part the media doesn’t want to show you... people were celebrating. Dancing. Cheering. Because the Iranian people have been hostages of this regime since 1979, and they know exactly what it is. The cost of war is horrific and anyone who pretends there’s a way to do this without innocent people dying is lying to you. This President didn’t lie about it. He said, in his own address, “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties... that often happens in war.” He’s telling you the truth. The question isn’t whether people will die. People were already dying... under the regime, in the protests the regime crushed by killing over seven thousand people in January alone. The question is whether the outcome justifies the cost. And the outcome... the permanent elimination of the Iranian nuclear threat, the destruction of the world’s number one state sponsor of terror, the liberation of eighty-eight million people from a medieval theocracy... is worth it. It has to be. Because the alternative was a nuclear-armed Iran, and a nuclear-armed Iran means the end of everything we’re trying to build. Cuba: Gravity Does the Work Cuba is the proof that the doctrine works even when you don’t fire a shot. Nobody invaded Cuba. Nobody bombed Havana. Trump simply cut the lifeline. When Maduro fell, the Venezuelan oil that kept Cuba alive disappeared. When Trump signed the executive order on January 29 threatening tariffs on any country that sells oil to Cuba, Mexico... which supplied forty-four percent of Cuba’s oil... suspended shipments. Russia called the situation “truly critical” but hasn’t sent a tanker. China made sympathetic noises but hasn’t delivered fuel. And now Cuba is collapsing under its own weight. Eighty-nine percent of families in extreme poverty. Schools suspended. Hospitals losing power. Airlines canceling flights because there’s no jet fuel. The regime can’t even run garbage trucks. This is what sixty-seven years of communism looks like when nobody’s willing to subsidize it anymore. Trump’s approach? “Make a deal before it’s too late.” He’s talking to people inside the Cuban system... including, reportedly, Raúl Castro’s grandson. Rubio, who understands Cuba better than anyone in government, is leading the effort. The terms haven’t been made public, but the logic is obvious... open the economy, release political prisoners, hold elections, or watch the lights go out for good. No Marines. No occupation. Just leverage, applied from a position of absolute economic dominance, and the patience to let gravity do what gravity does. So here is where it all comes together. Here is the part where you have to step back and look at the board... the whole board, not just the square you’re standing on. Before January 2025, the Western Hemisphere contained a hostile narco-state with the world’s largest oil reserves, a communist holdout that served as a forward base for Russian and Chinese influence ninety miles from Florida, and a Middle Eastern theocracy with an active nuclear weapons program that was funding terror organizations across three continents. Those were not theoretical threats. They were active, operational, escalating threats that any future president... of either party... would have had to deal with eventually. The question was never whether to deal with them. The question was how. And the twenty-five-year answer from the foreign policy establishment... sanctions that didn’t work, diplomacy that got played, nation-building that wasted trillions, forever wars that killed thousands... had been tried and had failed catastrophically. Iraq proved it. Afghanistan proved it. Libya proved it. What Trump has done in sixty days... Maduro captured, Khamenei killed, Cuba strangled into negotiation... is not a betrayal of the America First doctrine. It is the precondition for the doctrine. It’s the thing that has to happen once so that it never has to happen again. Think of it this way. If you inherit a house with a flooded basement, a collapsing roof, and a gas leak, you don’t get to say “I’m a low-maintenance homeowner” and sit on the porch. You have to fix the emergencies first. Rip out the pipes. Replace the roof. Seal the gas line. It’s expensive. It’s messy. People are going to say “I thought you said this would be a quiet house.” And you say... “It will be. After I fix the things that are about to kill us.” That’s what the second term has been. Emergency triage on a world that was handed to this President in a state of active decay. Not by accident, not by fate, but by the deliberate incompetence of everyone who came before. The Trump Doctrine... the real, permanent version... is still coming. And it will look exactly like what you voted for. No permanent troop deployments in Caracas. No American military governor in Tehran. No nation-building, no democracy-exporting, no trillion-dollar reconstruction funds. Get in. Fix the emergency. Arrange cooperative locals to run things in a direction that doesn’t threaten America. Get out. Venezuela is already on that track. The oil deal was signed within days of Maduro’s capture. Delcy Rodríguez is cooperating. American companies are investing. The troops are not staying. Iran is going to be harder and take longer... there’s active combat right now, this weekend, as you’re reading this. Three Americans are dead. More will follow, the President himself said so. But the objective is not to occupy Iran. The objective is to break the regime’s capacity to threaten the United States and its allies, support whatever transition the Iranian people choose... and they’re already in the streets, they’ve been in the streets since December... and then leave. This is not Afghanistan. There will not be twenty years of patrols in Isfahan. There will not be a democratic transition monitored by USAID consultants who’ve never been outside the Green Zone. There will be a broken regime, a liberated population, and an American exit. Cuba will fold without a single American boot on the ground. It’s already happening. And when it’s done... when the threats that took decades to build have been eliminated in months... the doctrine takes hold. Not as a slogan on a hat. Not as a campaign promise that sounds good in a rally and dissolves on contact with reality. As an actual, operational, strategic posture that future presidents will inherit and maintain, because the conditions that required intervention will no longer exist. No Iranian nuclear program to contain. No Venezuelan narco-pipeline to interdict. No Cuban forward base to monitor. No justification for the next generation of neocons to drag us into the next Iraq. That’s the vision. That’s what the second term is building toward. And I know it’s painful right now. I know three families are grieving tonight. I know more will grieve before this is over. And I know it looks, from the outside, like everything we were promised has been broken. But I’m asking you to hold the line. Not because the President is infallible... he’s not, nobody is... but because the logic is sound. You cannot build a fortress of peace on a foundation of unresolved threats. You have to clear the ground first. That’s what’s happening. It’s ugly and it’s costly and it was never going to look the way anyone wanted it to look. But the house will be clean. And then we maintain it. And then... finally, for the first time in a generation... we stop sending our kids to die in countries that hate us. That’s the Trump Doctrine. Not the opening act. The final destination. And we’re almost there.

No we don't.

Climate disciples want you to believe that a warmer planet is bad because it means that the weather is more volatile. One could make the case that warming causes it to get drier. But one could also argue that it causes more rain. So, I get where this comes from. But the truth is no one actually knows which will occur in the real world, so scientists just say, well, we’re going to see more rain and less rain at the same time. Then it goes more cold. Less cold. More snow. Less snow. More storms. Fewer storms. Fewer hurricanes. More stronger hurricanes. More El Niño. More La Niña. And so on… The point is, whatever happens with the weather, it is incontrovertible proof that a tiny increase in atmospheric CO₂ concentration is the proximate cause. It’s your fault and the only solution is to give the government more money. Today’s climate conditions are measured against the 1850-1900 averages. That is seen as the start of observations and the period before there was significant greenhouse forcing. But if anyone reads about what climates were like during that time (and before in the 18th century), it was far from ideal and benign. There is very good reason to believe that a colder climate is more extreme based on historical evidence, not the other way around, which is derived from modeling and grossly oversimplified theoretical physics that isolate variables to avoid the complexity of the real interactions between the dynamical fluid atmosphere and ocean.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝟗𝟕% 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐬 𝐌𝐲𝐭𝐡 𝐃𝐞𝐛𝐮𝐧𝐤𝐞𝐝 One of the most pervasive myths in science is that 97% (or sometimes stated as >99%) of “climate scientists” agree that all global warming since the mid-19th century is human-caused and that this warming is an existential threat to the welfare of the planet and all life on it. Except, this statistic is largely made up, and no matter how many times it is quashed, it persists as a talking point in online forums to weasel a way out of an honest discussion. The “consensus of scientists” is not organic. Rather, it was manufactured through questionable data processing methods in two studies published in Environmental Research Letters (ERL): Cook et al. (2013) and Lynas et al. (2021). Let's look closer at these studies. 🔎 𝐓𝐇𝐄 “𝟗𝟕% 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐄𝐒𝐍𝐒𝐔𝐒” The paper that got this all started was published in ERL in 2013. 🔗 iopscience.iop.org/article/1… Led by cognitive psychologist John Cook—a Senior Research Fellow at the Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change and founder of the climate blog, Skeptical Science—he and eight co-authors skimmed the abstracts of 11,944 climate-related papers published between 1991 and 2011. Of the 11,944 abstracts, a total of 7,930 (66.4%) of them expressed 𝒏𝒐 𝒑𝒐𝒔𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 on the cause(s) of global warming since the pre-industrial era. Of the remaining 4,014 abstracts that endorsed either anthropogenic global warming (AGW) or natural global warming, 3,896 (97.1%) endorsed AGW in at least some capacity, while 78 (1.9%) questioned or rejected AGW. The remaining 40 (1%) of papers expressed uncertainty. But, it gets even more nuanced than that if we look at the abstracts and pick them apart. On whether global warming is being caused entirely by human activities, by nature, or by a combination of both, of those 4,014 papers, they state, warming is caused: 🔴 Entirely by humans: 64 papers (1.59%) 🟤 >>50% by humans: 922 (22.96%) 🟡 Equally natural + man-made: 2,910 (72.50%) 🟢 >>50% by natural cycles: 54 (1.35%) 🔵 Man is causing no warming: 24 (0.60%) 🤷 Don't know: 40 (1.00%) So, a “97% consensus” can be contrived by either (a) omitting the 7,930 (66.4% of) abstracts in the 11,944-paper sample that did not explicitly state a position on the drivers of global warming, or by (b) lumping all 3,896 abstracts that endorsed at least some anthropogenic component as entirely endorsing AGW. Either way, that's sausage-making. 🌭 Because either way you compute this data honestly, there is far from a “97% consensus” that most or all global warming is man-made. There's only a 24.6% consensus on that, at best. There is a 97% consensus that at least 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒 of that warming is man-made, but that doesn't mean that all (or even most) has been. But, what about the >99% consensus? Let's find out. 🔎 𝐓𝐇𝐄 “>𝟗𝟗% 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐄𝐒𝐍𝐒𝐔𝐒” Like Cook et al. (2013), Lynas et al. (2021) attempted to quantify the consensus on AGW. 🔗 iopscience.iop.org/article/1… In this synthesis, 3,000 climate papers were selected at random. In that batch, 282 were marked as false positives since they weren't actually climate-related. That’s fair. So, the analysis continued with the remaining 2,718 peer-reviewed articles. Of those, 1,869 (68.8%) of them took 𝒏𝒐 𝒑𝒐𝒔𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 on AGW. And, like Cook et al. (2013), all 1,869 papers neither endorsing nor rejecting AGW were discarded. Of the remaining 849 papers that did endorse a position, 845 (99.5%) of them sided with AGW while four did not. So, like Cook et al. (2013), Lynas et al. (2021) ignored over 65% of the papers selected that didn't take one position or the other on the physical driver(s) of global warming. By doing this, the authors could artificially manufacture a consensus on an issue where none actually existed if all of the relevant papers were considered. The advantage that Lynas et al. (2021) has over Cook et al. (2013) is that each paper was examined thoroughly rather than just the abstract. This made for a more thorough analysis despite the same flawed methodology both used in ignoring the majority of papers that took a neutral stance. 🧵 1/4 (Keep reading) ⬇️

Ryan McWeeny writes… Sadly, Mike is one of many demonstrably intelligent and reasonable people that has somehow been captivated and caught up in the crossing over from healthy skepticism to conspiratorial mysticism. I will never understand how this happens, but they all eventually become convinced of some thing or another and put the burden of proof on you to disprove their “evidence” which deceptively looks as though it supports their claim by the sheer nature of its unfalsifiability… which is a far cry from it being true. Hello, Mr. McWeeny, and thanks for your comment. I found it this morning on a flight to LA, buried in a flurry of similar disappointment regarding my recent conversation with Gavin de Becker about his new book, Forbidden Facts: Government Deceit & Suppression About Brain Damage from Childhood Vaccines.” In spite of my “demonstrable intelligence” (thanks for that!), you seem to believe I'm mistaken to be curious about the role vaccines might be having on childhood illness. Obviously, you’re not alone. There’s a great hew and cry in the comment section today, and more pearl clutching than usual. But I wonder, Mr. McWeeny, what else you might have in common with those who believe the science is settled. Four possibilities come to mind. 1. You didn’t read the book (which you can get here. bit.ly/4oMAxsz) 2. You didn’t watch to the interview (which you can watch here. bit.ly/4oKIXRg) 3. You have no intention of doing either (which you can accomplish pretty much anywhere.) 4. You believe, like so many others who actually spelled it out for me (often in CAPS and with multiple exclamation points,) that with respect to all things vaccine-related, “THE SCIENCE HAS BEEN SETTLED!!!” To your credit, you didn’t use those actual words, but lots of others did, and I’m wondering if you share their desire to throw the scientific method out the window at a time when both science and skepticism are so critical to our country. Forgive me if you already know this, but I feel it needs to be said, even from a non-scientist like me. The scientific method has less to do with “settling” things and more to do with “testing” things. This is because scientists are always learning and, therefore, often mistaken. It’s the essence of the job. Once upon a time the best minds in science believed the sun revolved around the earth. The finest doctors drained most of the blood from George Washington in a failed attempt to save his life. Like bloodletting, lobotomies were very common, as were tonsillectomies and radical mastectomies. Physicians used to recommend smoking and diets high in sugar, and it was the scientific community who put poor Iggy Semmelweis – the man who paved the way for modern germ theory - into an insane asylum for suggesting that doctors should wash their hands before performing surgery, where he died, ironically, of blood poisoning. Honest question. Mr. McWeeny, for you and all the others who believe @GDBAProtects is a “science denier” and I’m some sort of conspiracy nut. Would you have supported Galileo’s arrest and imprisonment for daring to question the way our solar system actually worked? Would you have accused him of putting the burden of proof on you to disprove the “evidence” by the sheer nature of its unfalsifiability? Most people alive back then did exactly that, and I wonder if you’d be among them. I wonder the same about myself. Not to belabor the point, scientists are not supposed to be certain; they’re supposed to be skeptical – especially when they think they’re correct. They’re supposed to doubt their own findings, and then, if their findings are peer reviewed and accepted as fact, and a consensus forms, a proper scientist - like a proper journalist - will keep his ego and his personal opinion out of it. They will remain objective, ever mindful that new evidence or new information might demand a new conclusion. Science requires humility, along with curiosity, and most of all, doubt. Your position, Mr. McWeeny, requires arrogance, certainty, and a level of institutional trust that seems naïve in today’s environment. And no, you don’t need to be a scientist to know this. Of course, there’s another reason I’m open to the possibility that we’ve been misled, and that’s because we’ve been misled before. Many times. Do you not recall the cover-ups around Agent Orange, Johnson’s Baby Powder, the water in Flint Michigan, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Thalidomide Crisis, the Opioid Crisis, or so many others? Have you forgotten the countless experts who assured us that masking, social distancing, and endless boosters were all scientifically sound? Have you forgotten the way our elected officials, our media, and so many of our top scientists demanded – in the immortal words of Eric Cartman - to “respect my authoritay!!! I fear that you have, Mr. McWeeny. And I worry that lots of other people have, too. I doubt repetition will help my cause, but I’ll say it again. I haven’t said we’ve been lied to about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. But I’m certainly open to that possibility, because the evidence is compelling. Childhood diseases have exploded in the last two decades. Is it really “conspiratorial mysticism” to wonder if the exploding vaccine schedule might have something to do with that? I know, correlation does not equal causation, and yes, I’m familiar with the Dunning-Kruger Effect, another popular accusation leveled at me in the comment section. (What else would you expect from a “demonstrably intelligent” non-scientist like me?) But why is it so hard for an educated man such as yourself to understand that we can no longer hope to persuade the masses to believe a claim simply because it’s supported by people with the proper credentials? What’s the downside of challenging the status quo, especially in light of new data, or conducting new studies to see what the latest research yields? It's true that Gavin’s book is controversial, and it’s also true that he is not a scientist. Indeed, he makes the point repeatedly throughout his book and our conversation. But it’s also true that he’s earned the trust and respect of several dozen world leaders, including several US presidents and countless CEOs who have trusted him with their lives and the lives of their families. He’s not some hack writer trying to get rich by riling up the masses. Gavin is already rich. He’s also concerned that a lot of Americans have been misled about something profound and consequential. Yes, he is skeptical of the claim that all vaccines are “safe and effective,” but every single claim in his book is backed by an astonishing amount of research and data, all of which are accessible through hundreds of QR codes throughout. So, what’s the problem, exactly? Why are you and so many others threatened by a book that encourages people to look beyond the credentials of an expert and a conversation that encourages people to assume a measure of personal responsibility? And why do you suppose there’s never been a large, robust, and completely transparent study that compares the health of thousands of vaccinated kids to the overall health of unvaccinated kids? Moreover, why do you think there’s so much opposition to conducting and publishing such a study today? I don’t know the answer, Mr. McWeeny, but unlike you, I’m curious to find out. PS. Gavin's book is #1 in three categories, and sends his thanks to you all.

I have some thoughts on the outcome of the Virginia election. First, I do not want to hear another left-winger say “Vote for the person of color” ever again. Tonight in Virginia, you proved that “DEI” is just a vehicle you use to get what you want and then dump it as soon as it is no longer convenient. I also no longer want to hear how morally superior and empathetic you are. You just elected an Attorney General who openly fantasized about conservatives’ children being killed to force them to move on gun policy. That is Satanic. That would be immediately disqualifying for a Republican. But, Democrats continue to glorify and justify political violence and they refuse to get their house in order. Their reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and this includes a number of people I went to college with, cements this as a hard fact. I am unaffiliated with any political party, but I am, on most issues, conservative. I don’t vote along party lines, but while most of the GOP is utterly useless, the Democrats have completely lost the plot. Until the likes of John Fetterman and Bill Maher become the norm again in their party, I refuse to vote for any Democratic candidate. The only reason Virginia is so blue now is because a bunch of federal employees live in Arlington, Fairfax and Loudoun counties and commute to D.C. Had FDR not turned the federal government into a jobs program, this wouldn’t be the case. My primary residence is still Virginia, so I am still registered to vote there, but I now temporarily live in the south for work. I soon plan on making my stay permanent. Virginia is the California of the east thanks to the overdevelopment of Northern Virginia. It isn’t the blue collar, farm country I was born and raised up in 22 years ago.

I just came across this in an Open Society Foundations document about how to fix public “mistrust” of liberal "democracy," and I honestly feel sick reading it. I've read many alarming quotes, but few are so "mask off" like this. "I believe the time has come for a responsible, courageous elite, those who care far more about addressing the genuine social problems than about election results. Only a political elite with vision, prudence and a focus on the general good—to whom the electorate… can cede part of their sovereignty in the elections—will be able to justify public trust and spearhead... our struggle to survive."" Read that again. The proposed solution to the public's distrust in democracy... is less democracy. An unelected "elite" to whom the public should cede sovereignty. Abolish democracy to save democracy. This kind of thinking is what we're up against.

Let me grab some crayons. 🖍️ The Trump administration retired the “Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters Database” from NOAA because it is a misleading metric and has been used to prop hyperbolic climate misinformation by the news media and TV meteorologists. It is commonly claimed that the rise in natural disaster costs is due to climate change, but the real factor is the increase in placement of wealth in high-risk areas, such as the eastern U.S. coastline. I want you to take a close look at the two side-by-side photographs of Miami Beach, Florida shown below. 🛩️ The photograph on the left shows Miami Beach near 63rd street in 1925 taken from an airplane. 🛰️ The photograph on the right shows roughly the same shot taken from Google Earth satellite imagery in 2019. Expand the images. Look at them closely. 👀 Do you see anything? You might notice there are 30-story high-rise condos and apartments along the coast, most of which did not exist in the 1980s, much less 100 years ago when the first photograph was taken. Urban sprawl like this exists in every major city's metropolitan area. The more we build housing developments and plazas in high-risk, disaster-prone areas, the more vulnerable society becomes to natural hazards like flooding, tornado outbreaks, forest / wildfires, hailstorms and hurricane-induced storm surge. As a result, natural 𝒉𝒂𝒛𝒂𝒓𝒅𝒔 that have always existed often become natural 𝒅𝒊𝒔𝒂𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒔 because there is just more stuff to destroy now. Even in a static, non-changing climate. It doesn't take nearly as much now to get a “billion-dollar disaster” today as it did even two decades ago. This isn't magic. 🪄🎩 It is basic arithmetic and common sense. 🧠 Even when adjusted for inflation (i.e., the Consumer Price Index), simply looking at the cost of aftermath is misleading because NOAA's methodology does not take into consideration changes in exposure over time (Pielke, 2024). In other words, NOAA does not take into consideration the scenario above. When costs are adjusted as a percentage of GDP, the trend becomes slightly negative. 🔗nature.com/articles/s44304-0…

This is a very BIG deal, so let me break it down. The International Maritime Organization (IMO), the UN body regulating maritime transport, will vote this Friday to finalize their “net zero framework” for shipping across the board. 🚢 Beginning in 2028, all ships will need to switch to “cleaner” (defined as less carbon-intensive) fuels or pay high fines. Specifically, companies will be required to pay $380 USD for every ton of carbon dioxide (CO₂) or CO₂ equivalent emitted above a fixed threshold with an additional $100 fine on emissions above a stricter limit. 💵 And, that “tax” will then be passed down to consumers. As I have said before, “carbon pricing” is just a wealth redistribution scam. I agree with @RonDeSantis. All funding to the UN by the U.S. needs to be withheld.

Says the guy who presided over the fabrication of the Russian collusion narrative and the IRS targeting of conservatives…