Chris Alpert

I am a senior coordinating producer for the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. I have worked eleven of these. I was backstage at the Washington Hilton when the shots were fired. The first thing I heard was not the gunfire. It was glass. A champagne flute hit the floor of the International Ballroom at approximately 9:47 PM. Then a second. Then the sound that I have since been told was a 12-gauge shotgun, which from inside the ballroom sounded like a heavy door slamming in a parking garage. Then the Secret Service moved. They moved the President, the Vice President, the First Lady through the east corridor in under ninety seconds, which is protocol, which is practiced, which is the one part of the evening that worked exactly as it was designed. Everything else was improvised. I know this because I ordered the wine. 94 tables. Two bottles per table. 188 bottles of a Willamette Valley pinot noir that the Association selected in February after a tasting committee spent three meetings debating between Oregon and Burgundy. Oregon won. The budget was $14,200. I signed the invoice. I can tell you the vintage. I can tell you the distributor. I can tell you the per-bottle cost because I negotiated it down from $89 to $76. What I cannot tell you is how 147 of those bottles left the building during an active shooter evacuation. I can tell you what I saw. A correspondent from a network I will not name picked up two bottles on her way to the east exit. Full bottles. One in each hand. She was wearing heels and she did not spill. A man in a tuxedo tucked one inside his jacket the way you'd shoplift a paperback at an airport bookstore. A woman picked up a bottle, looked at the label, put it back, and took a different one. She checked the vintage. During an evacuation. That's editorial judgment under pressure. The theme of the dinner was "A Free Press for a Free People." The banners were still hanging when the evacuation began. I know because I hung them. Twenty-three banners, navy blue, gold serif lettering, $11,400 for the set. They were still hanging when 2,600 guests were directed to the exits by Secret Service agents, one of whom had just taken a shotgun round in his ballistic vest and walked to the ambulance on his own feet. The agent's vest costs approximately $800. The wine that left the building was worth $11,172 at Association cost. At restaurant markup, roughly $29,000. The guests saved more in wine than the vest that saved the agent. That's priority. The video went viral by 10:15 PM. Not the video of the evacuation. Not the Secret Service response. The wine. Three guests in formalwear grabbing bottles off white tablecloths while being told to move toward the exits, while a man with a shotgun stood in the same motor entrance where John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan 45 years ago. A woman near the service entrance was crying. She said "I just wanna go home." She was not holding wine. She was holding her phone. She was the only person I saw that night who looked afraid rather than inconvenienced. That's the distinction. The rest of the ballroom did not look afraid. They looked interrupted. An active shooter at the WHCD is a logistical problem. The dinner was disrupted. The timeline was off. The after-party at the French Ambassador's residence would need to be rescheduled. These are contingency matters. Contingency matters have solutions. Fear is for people who attend events without security details. I have produced eleven of these dinners. I have managed seating charts that require diplomatic-grade negotiations. I have handled comedians, cabinet secretaries, network anchors, and the editor of a major newspaper who once threatened to leave because his table was behind a column. I have never, in eleven years, seen a guest leave a $76 bottle on the table during an evacuation. I have also never seen a guest check the label first. Both observations are consistent. The bottle is worth taking. The evacuation is worth surviving. The instinct is to do both simultaneously. 188 bottles placed. 41 recovered. 147 unaccounted for. One agent shot. Zero guests injured. Zero bottles broken. A free press for a free people. The press is free. The wine was $76 a bottle. They took it anyway.

You can hate Trump and still see this is a real reset. That shouldn’t be a controversial sentence, but people are too blinded by politics to talk straight. Maybe this works. Maybe it blows up. But the old path was broken too, and that part gets ignored because people would rather scream than think. Debt was getting worse. Trade was a joke. The border was a joke. America looked less like a superpower and more like a country slowly losing control. So yeah, this is interesting. Not because you have to love the man. Because something big is actually being tried. If it works, it likely means better trade positioning, tighter borders, more leverage overseas, more control around energy and shipping, and less room for other countries to keep pushing around a soft America. That could help growth. Could help confidence. Could help the dollar over time. Could help America act like the power it still is. Or it could fail badly. But this is the part people need to grow up about: It’s happening. So the conversation cannot just be endless emotional warfare. It should be what this changes, where it helps, where it hurts, and what happens next.

It’s amazing how many people on this platform have clearly never watched a real negotiation with a terrorist regime or any terrorist entity for that matter. This isn’t sunshine and rainbows. It’s pressure, consequences, and making it unmistakably clear that if the Iranian regime won’t change their ways, they highly risk being ended. Let’s get something straight, because this keeps getting butchered, the civilization he is talking about ending is the Islamist regime, the assholes that took over 47 years ago and literally ruined the original Persian civilization in Iran that no one in the west seems to ever show empathy for. That distinction shouldn’t be this hard. And no, they shouldn’t be forced to be subservient to terrorists for another 50 years because you with 50,000 followers on some social media echo chamber said so. While some rush to defend a failed terrorist state, that same regime has been hanging teenagers this whole past week. I’ve seen zero concern over that, they’ve also been sending 12 year olds to be cannon fodder. Spare me the outrage. And to those immediately spiraling into “this means nuclear war,” please chill and relax a little. All this literally is ending a future nuclear threat. Not every hard-line equals global catastrophe. That’s not how this works. You’ve grown so used to watching terrorist pandering that you don’t even recognize what resolve looks like. The regime are paper tigers let them fold or make a choice that will lead to their ultimate demise. As Winston Churchill put it, “We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it.”

KEVIN WARSH JUST SOFT-LAUNCHED THE BITCOIN STANDARD This man sat down in a dark room with two mugs and a rug from the Ottoman Empire and casually implied the Fed has lost the script and that Bitcoin might be the footnote that replaces the entire book. This is the future Federal Reserve Chairman. And he just dropped harder Bitcoin alpha than 95% of Crypto Twitter, in a suit, without moving a single facial muscle. The guy who might be printing your money next thinks Satoshi might’ve been right. Wall Street right now is chain-smoking inside marble tombs like “Wait wait wait, the next Fed Chair believes the dollar is a slow rug-pull and that a decentralized open-source spreadsheet might fix it?” Yes. Yes he does. And he’s saying it like he’s reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to a room full of newborns. Jamie Dimon just spilled his oat milk latte all over his Macbook. “HOW DID WE LOSE TO A PDF?” You did, Jamie. You lost to SHA-256, anons with frog PFPs, and a timechain that never forgets. And now Kevin Warsh is out here calmly explaining that Bitcoin is monetary Darwinism and the Fed is a wounded antelope limping through the savannah of capital markets while BlackRock and Fidelity polish their sniper rifles. This is the final act of fiat monetary theater. The curtain is coming down and behind it is a cold wallet and a single word: “EXIT.” Imagine being a legacy banker hearing this. You spent 30 years climbing the yield curve, sacrificing your soul to spreadsheets, waiting to be knighted by Goldman just to wake up one day and find out the new Fed Chair is basically Michael Saylor in a Brooks Brothers suit whispering that the petrodollar is dead and your kids should probably own BTC. And it gets better. Because when Bitcoin finally rips to $1M and fiat starts trading like Argentinian airline miles, you’ll look back at this clip of Kevin Warsh sipping coffee and nodding solemnly and realize it was the monetary equivalent of the Archduke getting popped in 1914. It’s happening. The Fed Chair is going to orange pill the world... quietly, clinically, and with the precision of a central banker who understands that Bitcoin is the solution to the current system. The monetary singularity just got a name tag. Hello, my name is Kevin. I’ll be your funeral director for fiat.

The banks are PISSING THEMSELVES. They’ve just realized that some autistic crypto startup in a WeWork with $20 million in T‑Bills and a React front-end is about to nuke the entire $17 trillion U.S. deposit base… …by offering 4.9% yield on a stablecoin while JPMorgan gives you 0.01% and a debit card that expires in two years. “BUT THAT’S NOT FAIR” – every bank lobbyist ever Now the banking system, this Godzilla made of soy, duct tape, and 11,000 physical branches, is whining to Congress like: “This isn’t fair! If people can earn yield on dollars outside the bank… they might leave the bank!” No shit. That’s the point. You locked everyone into a zero‑yield Ponzi for a decade while printing $7 trillion, and now you’re shocked people want out? What’s next, are you gonna sue water for being wet? This is a regulatory street fight between code and bureaucracy, between global liquidity that settles in five seconds and the rotting husk of Bretton Woods wearing a suit made of FDIC pamphlets. And guess what? The White House is hosting peace talks. Yes. Trump’s team just invited Circle and Coinbase to sit down with Jamie Dimon and tell him that the future of dollars may not involve Jamie Dimon. Can you imagine the mood in that meeting? “Hi Jamie, meet Brian from Circle. He tokenizes T-Bills with six engineers and a Discord server. He’s taking 3% of your deposits and none of your regulatory costs. Thoughts?” The reality is that every time one of these banks says “we’re concerned about financial stability,” what they mean is: “Please don’t let these crypto goblins disrupt our ability to harvest yield off the lower-middle class with 18% credit cards and 0% checking accounts.” They want protection rackets codified into law. Like “you can’t offer yield on stablecoins unless you’re a licensed bank,” aka: “We missed the boat, so let’s blow up the dock.” Banks can’t compete. Let’s model it: A bank: 11,000 branches, 75,000 tellers, legacy core systems from 1982, and a CFO who thinks Solana is a fish. Circle: 25 people, 100% T-Bill backing, 24/7 redemptions, yield streamed on-chain like Netflix. Now let me make this brutally simple... Who wins? The guys with marble lobbies or the protocol that turns dollars into yield-bearing bearer assets? The banks are playing defense against stablecoin yield... but what happens when it clicks that stablecoins are just a transition vector to full monetary exit? What happens when people use stablecoins to bootstrap into Bitcoin treasuries with self-custody? You go from “5% yield off Circle’s T-Bill stack” to “30% CAGR in purchasing power in a bearer asset that can’t be diluted and lives outside the IMF death loop.” That’s endgame stuff. The banks are scared of USDC + USDT. Wait until every mom in Omaha is yield farming STRC dividends from their Roth IRAs using a Lightning app. We’re replacing the entire fiat architecture with a monetary black hole. reuters.com/sustainability…

🚨 GLOBALISM JUST DIED IN DAVOS Howard Lutnick just walked into the lion’s den — and told the World Economic Forum exactly what they didn’t want to hear. “Globalism has failed.” Not whispered. Not softened. Declared — on their own stage. He dismantled the entire WEF doctrine in minutes: • Offshoring hollowed out the West • Cheap labor destroyed innovation • Net Zero made Europe dependent on China • Sovereignty begins with borders • Nations must control their industry, energy, and medicine Then came the line that shook the room: “Why would Europe agree to Net Zero when they don’t even make a battery?” That’s the truth globalists can’t answer. Green agendas without industry. Climate pledges without sovereignty. Moral posturing while outsourcing power to Beijing. America First isn’t isolation. It’s independence. And Lutnick made it crystal clear: The old model is finished. The globalist experiment has failed. And the future belongs to nations that put their people first. Davos just heard the obituary — live.

Trump vs. Davos Delivering The Terms of Surrender 🏳️ LFG 💥 "This is a National Roll Out"👈 If you are not following these women, you need to! prometheanaction.com @CaptKylePatriot

HOLY CRAP! Tim Burchett is GOING OFF this morning over how BAD insider stock trading is in DC. I have NOT seen him this FIRED UP like this ever before. "You know, everybody talks about this place being a dadgum swamp. It's NOT a swamp. A swamp is something cool God created. It filters water, animal life lives and flourishes around it." "[Washington DC] is a SEWER and it needs to STOP." "Everybody wants to knock Pelosi. Heck, she's not even in the TOP 10... This body has been enriching itself on the taxpayers’ money." "This place is as CROOKED as a dog’s leg." "Let’s quit with this nonsense. Let’s give America a reason to trust Congress for once in our MISERABLE lives. This is our chance to STAND UP and say we hear what you’re saying, we are going to fix this dadgum problem, but probably won’t do it and I’ll remained ticked off the rest of the day because of this and it needs to STOP." I wish EVERY LAST member of Congress had this kind of visceral reaction to the American people getting F*CKED. Godspeed @timburchett, I will pray for your sanity.

Western Civilization is doomed, unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognized and actions are taken that are hard, but necessary for survival

The battle lines between capitalism and socialism were clearly drawn last night. Texas is now the unrivaled HQ for capitalism in the US. We lead the country in finance sector employment & new stock exchanges. Capitalism always prevails. Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than all of the social programs in the world. We will secure capitalism for the future of our country and deny the expansion of socialism that is creeping across the US.

@libsoftiktok @CWBChicago

(Warning: long rant) My liberal friends are completely oblivious about how radicalizing the last week has been for tens of millions of normal Americans. Zero clue. I’m not talking about people who are “online”; I mean regular, everyday Americans. “Normies.” People who scroll through Facebook posts and Instagram reels from the Dutch Bros drive thru line. Political moderates who have water cooler chats about Mahomes touchdowns and Bon Jovi concerts, not Twitter threads or Rachel Maddow monologues. Millions of them. Tens of millions. They’re logging on, they’re engaging, and they’re furious. And I’ll be candid: They blame you guys. They blame the left. Regardless of whether you believe it to be justified, they think you’re the bad guys here. And they are reacting accordingly. I can already hear some of you racing toward the comments to start screeching in moral indignation, so I’m going to be blunt: Shut up and listen to what I’m telling you. Your movement will lose any semblance of relevance if you don’t develop some small measure of self-awareness, and—absent someone force-feeding you bitter medicine—you guys collectively lack the humility to do this on your own. Here are the facts: Fact 1. Tens of millions of Americans started the week seeing a 23-year-old blonde woman—a young woman in whom virtually every parent watching pictured their own daughter—stabbed in the neck by a career criminal. These people then found out the murderer had been released from jail 14 times over. Fact 2. Two days later, tens of millions of Americans watched a video of Charlie Kirk get murdered speaking to college students. Millions of these people knew who Charlie was; millions of them didn’t. Upon seeing the video, however, these normal Americans from across the land and across the political spectrum agreed that he was the victim of a terrible, fundamentally unjustifiable crime, and their hearts broke in sympathy for his family. Good people who had never even heard the name Charlie Kirk before wept. Fact 3. Immediately after seeing the footage of a peaceful young man get shot in the neck, these same people logged onto Facebook and Instagram (remember, we are talking about regular Americans, not perpetually online Twitter or Bluesky users) and saw some of their local nurses, school teachers, college administrators, and retail workers celebrating this horrific crime. Not just defending it, but cheering it. These are all facts. You may not like the implications of these facts, and we can certainly debate the underlying causes thereof, but, indisputably, they are nevertheless factual statements. Here’s what it means for you, the Democrats reading this: These normal, middle-of-the-road, non-political citizens just become politically active. They realized that politics cares about them, even if they don’t particularly care about politics. After watching Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk both bleed out from the neck, they think their lives and the physical safety of their families—the bedrock of human society, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—depend on political activation, whether they desire it or not. These people are now sprinting—not jogging, not walking, but racing—to the right. Because they blame you guys for everything that just happened. When they see footage of Decarlos Brown stabbing a Ukrainian refugee to death, they don’t see just one demon-possessed man. They picture every university administrator, HR bureaucrat, and DEI apparatchik that ever lectured them about systemic racism, the “carceral state,” or the need to release violent crime suspects without bail in the name of social justice. They then think back to conversations they’ve had with their cop friends—their buddy from high school who quit the force after getting tired of being called a racist, their friend at the local YMCA who vents about having to release career criminals because Soros-funded prosecutors aren’t willing to file charges—and they realize everything the left has told them over the last five years has been utter bullshit. And they blame you. Because, even if you count yourself as a moderate Democrat, your party supported the district attorneys, city council members, and mayors that let fictitious concerns about mental health and racial justice supersede very real concerns for their family’s safety. When these Americans see blood erupt from the side of Charlie Kirk’s neck, they don’t see just a martyred political activist. They think of every extreme leftist they’ve ever met who (1) calls anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton a fascist and (2) constantly jokes—“jokes”—about punching Nazis and “bashing the fash.” They realize that there really do exist people who wish to see them dead for their moderately conservative political beliefs, their Christian faith, and even the color of their skin. They ask themselves if the violence visited upon Charlie might one day show up on their own doorstep. And they blame you. Because, even if you’re just a center-of-the-road liberal, you lacked the courage to police your own ranks. You let modern-day Maoist red guards run loose across every facet of society, and what started with social-media struggle sessions has now turned to 30-06 bullet holes. When these Americans log onto social media and see their neighbors justifying, celebrating, glorifying murder, they realize that some who walk among them are soulless ghouls at best, literally demon-possessed at worst. These people—whether they faithfully attend church every Sunday or only attend with relatives once a year, on Christmas Eve—start talking about things like spiritual warfare. They implicitly understand that no normal human casually celebrates the mortal demise of a peaceful person. And they blame you. Because, even if you condemned Charlie Kirk’s murder, they probably haven’t seen you condemn those in your own movement who cheered it on. They view you as complicit in allowing heartless fellow travelers to celebrate death, and it repulses them. For all of these situations, what has your response been? Nothing but bullshit. In response to Iryna Zarutska bleeding out on the floor of a train, you post bullshit statistics about reductions in reported crime, when everyone who’s ever been to a major urban center in the last decade knows that actual crime has skyrocketed, only for victims not to waste their time reporting it to cops that don’t have the manpower to respond and prosecutors that seek to downgrade as many felonies as possible to misdemeanor citations. In response to a 31-year-old man taking a bullet to the neck in front of his family, you post nothing but bullshit whataboutism. > “What about January 6th?” (Honest answer: After you let Liz Cheney spend two years operating a star chamber in the House, combined with countless other failed attempts at “lawfare” against Trump, no one cares anymore.) > “What about Mike Lee making a dumb joke on Twitter about some guy in a mask in Minnesota?” (No one outside of Utah, DC, or Twitter knows who Mike Lee even is.) > “What about Paul Pelosi?” (That’s not comparable to Charlie Kirk getting shot, and we all know it. And, again, Paul who?) > “What about regulations on assault rifles?” (That’s not going to get you very far when one of these killers used a knife and the other one used a common hunting rifle.) In response to teachers, healthcare workers, and thousands of other liberals cheering on Charlie’s murder, it’s nothing but more bullshit and misdirection. > “It’s not THAT many people celebrating!” (Yes, it is. Everyone has seen it on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.) > “I thought you guys didn’t support cancel culture.” (We don’t cancel people over their opinions; we’re more than happy to see people lose their jobs—especially their taxpayer-funded jobs—for actively cheering on murder, though. If you can’t see the difference, that’s your own shortcoming.) All bullshit. Not even smart bullshit, but stale, mid-grade, low-IQ bullshit. Ordinary Americans see right through it, and they don’t like how it smells. You probably don’t like hearing this. But you need to hear it. Because I’m right, and, as you reflect on this, you know I’m right. The ranks of my political movement gained millions of righteously angry new members this week. We have a mandate to ensure these crimes never happen again, and that’s exactly what we are now going to do. If you want to keep a seat at the table as we do so, you’d better clean house and start policing your own.

The guardian reported "110k" at our London rally today. Yet, literally had their own helicopter showing the millions of patriots 🤡 Legacy media proving again they'll just lie to your face for their own agenda. This is why nobody trusts them. We are the media now.

4 Essential Functions of Government according to Milton Friedman: 1) Defense from foreign enemies. 2) Protect the individual citizen from abuse/coercion by other citizens. 3) Define the rules. 4) Judicial System: Mechanism for adjudicating disputes around the meaning of rules.

Doesn’t matter what side you are on or where you live in the world, this IS an interesting listen. Every neighborhood, city, country, person should listen to this and then think.

@Attilio_D 25% tariffs will remain in place.

#Trump's Tarrifs. Canada is not on the chart...looks like we are allies after all! #TrumpTariffs

💯

Would you believe these insane tariffs that the U.S. is bullying Canada with? 250% for milk? 291% for butter? 208% for whey? 241% for CHEESE? Oh wait - those are actually tariffs that Canada imposed on the U.S. last year.

@elonmusk This one is worth seeing.