Champion of Truth
Trump is a scarcity president.
Scott Galloway didn’t expect to have kids and didn’t expect it to change his life. But it did, and gave his life meaning and purpose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGUWMonAtTQ
“On March 15, the Trump administration loaded more than 200 men onto three planes bound for El Salvador, where they were to be locked in its notorious CECOT prison. A video of the men being marched, head-down, into police vehicles and into the facility ricocheted around the world, a symbol of the United States’ position on immigrants it accuses of having gang ties.
But not seen by the camera were eight women who were also on the planes but never got off. Shortly after they landed, according to court filings, El Salvador apparently refused to take them. So they were shipped back, to be locked up again on American soil.
Now, for the first time, two of those women are speaking out in an interview with NBC News, describing the chaos they say they witnessed during the Trump administration’s deportation efforts and how, they allege, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials deceived them about where they were being taken.
“We were lied to,” said one of the women, Heymar Padilla Moyetones, 24. “They told us we were going to Venezuela, and it turns out that, no. When we arrived at our destination, that’s when they told us we were in El Salvador.”
Trump administration officials have said all of the people it has sent to El Salvador were Venezuelans who were carefully vetted and had clear ties to Tren de Aragua, a gang from Venezuela that the administration has designated a terrorist organization.
But the vetting process apparently did not include determining whether El Salvador would accept female detainees.
Moyetones said ICE officials kept her on the aircraft. “They didn’t let us leave. They told us that we were going back, that we were coming back here,” she said.”
…
““I came with a lot of dreams,” Moyetones said. Since she was a child, she said, the United States had been the country where she wanted “to make a life.” She ultimately came about a year ago, with her son, then an infant, to give him a better future.
“We thought that perhaps the treatment from people in this country would be different toward us,” she said, but after what happened with the flights, she is sad and disappointed with the United States and just wants to be deported back to her home country, Venezuela. But her son, now 2 years old, is in the care of a relative, and she does not know whether they will be reunited. “I am very afraid, because I have always been with my son,” she said. “I have always looked after my son, but I don’t know. I wouldn’t know what to tell you.””
https://www.yahoo.com/news/were-lied-two-women-trump-090040512.html
Musk is either confused or lying when he talks about Social Security.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVqrKteSvxs
ICE is not good at due process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaCM6V9c-YY
“Although the United States has the power to seriously disrupt economic life in other countries, the book argues, the consequences don’t always serve American interests. Sanctions hurt the prosperity and political standing of Iran’s pro-American middle class the most. They also make the government more paranoid and remove important incentives to play nice. Everyone seems worse off.
The U.S. has tried to wash its hands of the policy’s consequences for ordinary Iranians, blaming their poverty on domestic “corruption and economic mismanagement” rather than on sanctions. But the data are clear. The Iranian economy was booming from 1988, the end of the country’s war with Iraq, to 2011, the beginning of former President Barack Obama’s intensified sanctions campaign.
Obama’s innovation was secondary sanctions. As the flow of direct American-Iranian trade shrunk, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control punished companies in other countries that dealt with Iran. The Iranian economy became more or less radioactive, as any bank in the world that handled Iranian money and any shipping company that handled Iranian oil risked the wrath of the U.S. government.
Then Obama made a deal, lifting the sanctions in 2015 in exchange for restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. Trade resumed and foreign investment flowed back in—until Trump reimposed sanctions in 2018. (Despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, former President Joe Biden continued to enforce the same sanctions.) Iran has since come closer to building a nuclear bomb, and it has had more confrontations with the U.S. military.”
https://reason.com/2025/03/27/how-sanctions-backfire/
“U.S. manufacturing output, even adjusted for inflation, is near all-time highs. While about 5 percent below its December 2007 peak, it’s up 177 percent compared with 1975, the year America last ran an annual trade surplus. Industrial production—manufacturing, mining, and utilities combined—is higher than ever. That’s hardly a collapse.
A principal source of confusion is the difference between jobs and output. Yes, the number of workers in manufacturing has declined dramatically—from around 19 million in 1980 to about 13 million today. But that didn’t happen because America stopped making things. It happened because we got incredibly good at making things.
Productivity in manufacturing has surged thanks to automation, technology, and global supply chains. Just as we now produce more food than ever with just over 1 percent of Americans working in agriculture (down from around 75 percent in 1800), we produce more manufactured goods with far fewer workers. That’s not economic decline; it’s progress.
Also fueling the perception of decline are regional factors. Shuttered factories in Detroit or Youngstown, Ohio, bring concentrated pain and struggle for affected workers. No one denies this. But manufacturing didn’t disappear; it relocated and upgraded.”
https://reason.com/2025/03/27/no-the-u-s-industrial-base-is-not-collapsing/
Signal Chat Controversy Is an Endorsement of Encryption Software
https://reason.com/2025/03/28/signal-chat-controversy-is-an-endorsement-of-encryption-software/
“On Inauguration Day, President Donald Trump vowed to “forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.”
Less than two weeks later, Vice President J.D. Vance’s office hired Buckley Carlson—the 24-year-old son of former Fox News host and popular conservative pundit Tucker Carlson—as deputy press secretary.
At least young Buckley can be certain that he didn’t get the job because of the color of his skin.
The dismantling of the federal government’s various so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies has been one of the signature efforts of the first two months of the second Trump administration. Those rules often required that factors like race, gender, and ethnicity be considered alongside (or even ahead of) other more important things when the government was hiring, promoting, or awarding taxpayer-funded contracts.”
…
“And yet, what Trump has done over these first two months seems to be a long, long way from restoring meritocracy to the federal government or society at large—often in ways that matter much more than a silly patronage job handed out to Tucker Carlson’s kid.
Start with some of the personnel decisions the administration has made. Reducing the size of the federal workforce is a laudable goal, but the mass firings carried out by Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seem to have targeted probationary employees (those on the job less than a year, generally) first and foremost—despite DOGE’s public claims to the contrary. That’s an arbitrary approach that says absolutely nothing about merit and protects more senior employees simply because they’ve been around longer. Rather than promoting meritocracy, it is the sort of “last in, first out” thinking you’d expect from a teachers’ union.
That approach sits awkwardly alongside this week’s big news story: that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth disclosed sensitive operational details about a military operation in a group chat that included The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. Goldberg was reportedly invited to the chat by Michael Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, who has now also been put in charge of the investigation into how all of that happened. (Cue the meme!)
The implications have not gone unnoticed. If no one is fired over the group chat snafu, writes journalist Zaid Jilani, then “the message is that accountability is only for people at the bottom. People at the top can get away with anything.”
“There is no administration in the world—beyond this one—where a blunder of these proportions happens and nobody gets fired or resigns. Not in London. Not in Moscow. Not in Tokyo. Not in Pyongyang. Nowhere,” is how Politico summed it up on Thursday.
Without accountability, all that talk about meritocracy is pretty meaningless.”
https://reason.com/2025/03/28/the-meritocracy-lie/
Big Trump supporter regrets her Trump vote after she is fired under false pretenses from her government job. She says she got the highest possible rating on her previous review, yet was fired for poor performance.
Trump team thinks workers like her would be more productive in the private sector, and wants to get rid of any impediments to their often illegal and unconstitutional agenda and methods.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr6_qL17ryY
“The relief comes after a construction boom added tens of thousands of new units to the metro area last year alone, largely in its urban core. Builders rushed to Denver to meet demand from a population boom before and during the pandemic and are now completing them as growth has slowed.
“Everybody that wanted to move here because of remote work has moved here,” said Brian Sanchez, chief executive officer of Denver Apartment Finders, a locator service. “The demand is not keeping up with the supply.”
Between 2010 and 2020, the Denver region grew by more than 16% to nearly 3 million people. Since 2020, its growth has slowed to about 1% annually.
Rents for apartments of up to two bedrooms in the Denver metro area dropped 5.9% last year, according to Realtor.com. That’s a faster decrease than several other onetime hotspots for pandemic-era migration and construction, like Austin and Nashville. There, rents fell 5% and 4.4%, respectively in 2024.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/move-over-austin-denver-rents-are-falling-at-one-of-the-fastest-rates-in-the-country-131643629.html