Harrison Bergeron

So much noise online regarding the term "judeo-Christian." Guys -- in academia it's simply the term that describes the combined corpus of Old and New Testaments. The Jewish heritage of the Hebrew scriptures combined with the New Testament. That's it. I know you want there to be some conspiracy but there isnt, that's the way we're using it. It has nothing to do with geo-politics or a one world order.

Tyler Robinson has an alibi and eyewitnesses who can corroborate it. Baron Coleman warns that this could be catastrophic for the prosecution.

“I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Howard Beale says this on live television in 1976, in the middle of a nervous breakdown, in a film called Network. The network keeps him on air. Not despite the breakdown – because of it. The breakdown gets ratings. This is the whole film in three sentences. It is also the contemporary media in three sentences. 1. Beale is not wrong. That is the point. His rage is genuine, his diagnosis is accurate, his targets are real. And we know what he means – because we are mad too. Mad about institutions that stopped serving the people they were built for. Mad about media that manufactures reality rather than reporting it. Mad about governments that regulate everything except themselves. Mad about a system that tells you to be outraged about the right things, in the right direction, and then sells you the outrage back as content. Beale opened the window and screamed. Fifty years later, ten million people are screaming with him into their phones. And the system is just taking ad revenue from all that… 2. This is the discovery that makes Network one of the most prophetic films of the 20th century: authentic outrage is the most monetizable product ever invented. The system doesn’t fear your anger. It would only fear your action. The moment Beale starts screaming the truth, Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) — the programming executive who is the film’s real villain — sees not a crisis but a format. She feels nothing. Not corrupt in the old sense, not cynical in the obvious sense – simply unable to perceive the difference between a human being and a content category. She is the algorithm, fifty years before the algorithm existed. 3. Paddy Chayefsky wrote this in 1976 as savage satire. It is now a documentary. Every podcaster raging against the system, every mad prophet with a Substack and a loyal audience, every genuine breakdown that became content – Network described the mechanism fifty years before it became the operating model of the entire media ecosystem. The system will platform, package, and sell your genuine anger right up until the moment it stops paying, at which point it will cancel you just as efficiently. Howard Beale wasn’t silenced because he was wrong. He was silenced because he got boring. Diana Christensen does that in the film. She existed before the algorithm. The algorithm just scaled her. 4. The rage was real. The wound was real. The system took the rage, repackaged it, sold it back to the people who felt it, and used the revenue to fund the next cycle of whatever produced the rage in the first place. This is the perfect machine. Input: genuine human suffering. Output: engagement metrics. Byproduct: the suffering continues, because the suffering is the supply chain. 5. Beale is eventually assassinated on live television when his ratings drop. Not silenced by censorship, not broken by the gulag – cancelled, efficiently, the moment the numbers no longer justify the airtime. The audience watches. The show goes on. This is presented as satire. It is a user manual. 6. We are all watching the television. The television is now in our pockets, personalised, always on, feeding us outrage calibrated to our exact psychological profile. Howard Beale got one channel. We got ten thousand. The rage has never been louder. The system has never been more stable. 7. Because screaming, it turns out, is the safety valve – the pressure release the system deliberately leaves open, because rage expressed is rage exhausted. You open the window, you scream, you feel better, you go back to consuming. The system continues unchanged, slightly more data-rich, already building tomorrow’s outrage cycle from tonight’s comments section. Network was not a warning about television. It was a warning about what happens when the medium learns to feed on the message – and discovered that the safety valve is the most important part of the machine. I’m as mad as hell. The algorithm is grateful.

As a South Carolina native, I can think of no more fitting tribute to Lindsey Graham's legacy of service to our state and our nation than seeing his beloved sister carry it forward. Darline has always been at her brother’s side and I know she will be an outstanding interim Senator. The U.S. Treasury will do everything possible to support her and her staff as they work on the President’s agenda and continue to provide strong constituent services for the great people of South Carolina.