Ray Barnes

@TheChiefNerd He’s trolling hard, let the TDS commence.

President Trump just posted this…

No politician is coming to save you. Get a concealed carry permit, get training and stay armed to the extent you can. Ultimately you are responsible for your family’s and you safety. When your children are able train them on the use of firearms for self defense and help to get them licensed, trained and equipped.

I didn't think it could get worse, I was wrong. Watching that illegal animal from Haiti beat a woman to death with a hammer has radicalized me more than I thought possible. Our politicians bear the blame for this. It was an intentional policy choice. The Biden admin opened our border to the criminal filth from the third world knowing that would kill Americans like me and you. The blood is on their hands. Prosecute anyone inside the Biden admin who allowed for this to take place 13,000 Americans are DEAD because of them. These government officials must be punished. Lock them up.

(NYT) - Iran has been unable to open the Strait of Hormuz to more shipping traffic because it cannot locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway and lacks the capability to remove them, according to U.S. officials. @nytimes nytimes.com/2026/04/10/us/…

@CAgovernor The fraud in CA is and has been the only thing propping up the state economy. For obvious reasons you don’t want it to go away. So you attack those who do want it to go away. We see you.

California is again leading the charge against large-scale identity theft and hospice fraud. Today, we're taking decisive action against 14 providers who tried using stolen identities to bill Medi-Cal for nonexistent hospice services.

“I'm a 23 year-old gay man who's never had an orgasm.” Sen. Wiener, a leading advocate for sex rejection procedures, comes face to face w/the human cost. I’ve never seen him squirm like this. It took immense courage for @JonniSkinner to be public about this issue. 🙏 ❤️‍🩹

Besides their senior leaders, defense industrial base, nuclear program, navy and regional standing, Iran suffered no real losses.

News that the F‑15E Weapons Systems Officer has been safely rescued is a tremendous relief to every American. God bless our courageous troops serving across the globe, and God bless our soldiers who risked everything to bring their fellow Americans home.

I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. Take a moment and listen to this 81 second response from Victor Glover after being asked if he had any thoughts leading up to Easter. I don’t quite think it can be overstated how perfect this crew is for the job.

Tucker, Candace, Joe Kent: “Iran isn’t trying to build nuclear weapons. The Ayatollah said nukes are immoral!” Deputy Speaker of the Iranian Parliament: “We tried to develop nuclear weapons, but couldn't keep it secret.”

@ClownWorld I dont know who she is either.

Theo Von is arguably the dumbest sentient plank of wood in existence. The fact that someone with his level of geopolitical illiteracy gets to sit on the world’s most popular podcast and casually spew that kind of brain rotting nonsense is actually impressive in the worst possible way...

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

I want to apologize for not responding to any of the 22 thousand comments my last post inspired. I’ve been filming all week and just noticed my observations about Jimmy Kimmel and a former plumber named Markwayne Mullin have gone viral. I've also noticed that many of the comments are from people who genuinely seem to believe that Jimmy wasn’t belittling plumbers at all, but was instead, simply trying to point out that Mullin is not qualified to lead the DHS. Here's a small smattering... Roger Bicknell... Mikey stop. Kimmel wasn't making fun of plumbers he was making fun of Mullin. Rebecca Piatt Gonzalez... Dearest Mike, it's not anything to do with his being a plumber. It's him NOT being skilled in Homeland Security. Patrick Wise... Being a plumber qualifies you to be a plumber. Period. The issue Jimmy and the rest of us at the adult table recognize is that jobs require certain training and experience and being a plumber does not qualify you to be Sec of DHS. Had Roger, Rebecca, Patrick and all the others who rushed to Jimmy’s Kimmel’s defense actually read what I had written, they would see that I did not suggest - even remotely - that a plumber was inherently qualified to hold a cabinet position. What I said was that being a plumber should not disqualify a person from holding such a position. Big difference. Doctors, lawyers, veterinarians, fireman, and university professors are no more or less qualified to run the DHS than plumbers, electricians, or carpenters – but should they all be dismissed as “unqualified” simply because they made a living in some other vocation? As I wrote in my original post, credentials and diplomas are great ways to bolster a person’s credibility, especially if we’re talking about mastering a specific skill. I think we can all agree that plumbers, accountants, mechanics, and surgeons should all have to prove themselves competent before hanging out a shingle. But what do their credentials and diplomas have to do with their actual competency? Are we not already surrounded by a legion of perfectly qualified experts who don't know what the hell they're doing? Moreover, what do credentials and experience have to do with wisdom, honesty, common sense, integrity, courage, the ability to lead, or any other virtue we’d like to have in our elected officials? There are plenty of legitimate reasons to question Mullin’s suitability for this role. But there’s no legitimate reason to disqualify him simply because he used to be a plumber. Just as there was no legitimate reason to dismiss AOC because she used to tend bar. As for the joke itself, here’s an honest question. If Senator Mullin was a retired doctor instead of a retired plumber, do you believe he would have would made the same joke? Roger, Rebecca, Patrick...be honest. Do you really think Jimmy would have said to his audience, "So, now we have a DOCTOR in charge of protecting us from terrorism? Hey – it worked for Dr. Suess – maybe it’ll work for Markwayne!" Personally, I don't. Not in a million years. Why? Because no one would have found it funny, that’s why. Even though doctors are no more “qualified” to protect us from terrorists than plumbers are, Jimmy knows that doctors are widely respected in society, and that plumbers are not. He knows that medical degrees and doctorates are aspirational credentials, whereas plumbing certificates are not. The entire premise of his joke was based on a personal bias that he knew his audience shared – a bias that presupposes plumbers are uneducated, one-dimensional workers who never made it to college, and are therefore "unqualified" to do anything but plumb. Jimmy is entitled to his opinion, along with anyone else who believes that Mullin is unqualified to lead the DHS. The Constitution, however, says otherwise, and so does the Senate. Likewise, reasonable people can disagree as to what is funny and what isn’t. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. What I do care about, is the extraordinary shortage of plumbers and electricians our country is facing, and the longstanding stigmas and stereotypes that continue to discourage people from considering a lucrative career in the skilled trades. Jimmy’s joke – and his audience’s reaction to it – is proof positive that those stigmas and stereotypes are alive and well. PS. We have a lot of money set aside to help train the next generation of plumbers. Apply for a scholarship at mikeroweworks.org Who knows? Could be the first step on your road to President..

All the large accounts that present themselves as truth-seeking journalists or commentators, then quote posts like this and act utterly baffled—“What the hell!?” “WTF!?” “What’s going on here???”—are frauds. It took me less than a minute to see what the court documents actually said and understand what they meant. They do not show that the bullet was not fired from the gun. They show only that the bullet was too fragmented to confidently link it to ANY gun. This is not uncommon, and DOES NOT mean the bullet didn’t come from Robinson’s gun. Of course the defense attorneys are going to spin this as evidence that Robinson is innocent. That is what defense attorneys do. They scrape together every possible fragment of doubt and present it as if it were fully exculpatory. It’s not. Defense lawyers are paid to downplay or ignore evidence pointing to guilt, exploit people’s cognitive biases, and make fallacious arguments sound persuasive. This information about the bullet doesn’t erode the case for Robinson’s guilt in any way. It is totally neutral on that front. And it in no way invalidate the mountain of positive and mutually corroborating lines of evidence we do have for Robinson’s guilt. You should expect more from the commentators you follow, and hold them accountable by refusing to give them your attention in the future. If they could not be bothered to spend even one minute checking the facts before spreading confusion to you and millions of others on X, they do not deserve your attention. They are nothing more than grifting engagement farmers.

@ClownWorld Brilliant!

...Iran proves over and again that it is a terrorist state. Its immediate response is to attack civilian areas and neighbors. Hitting cities with cluster bombs and targeting tourist spots seems perfectly natural to these religious fanatics.

"God gave me strength, I couldn't let them folks die" 16 yr old Corion Evans was hanging out with his friends when he saw a car PLUNGE into the Pascagoula River in Mississippi. 3 teenage girls began screaming for help as the car quickly sank. Evans immediately sprang into action, diving in to rescue the girls. When asked where his bravery came from, he replied "God gave me strength, I couldn't let them folks die." Police Officer Gary Mercer assisted Evans with the rescue, but he began to drown as well when one of the panicking victims tried to pull him under. Despite being out of breath with exhausted legs, Evans swam back AGAIN to rescue both the Officer and the 3rd teen girl. Four people are alive today because a young man put the lives of others before his own. He truly is a hero. 🎖

@america Do it!

Leader John Thune suggests he’s open to including the SAVE America Act in Reconciliation, which would only need a simple majority “This was discussed, there is a lot of support... that's an option. If that's what it takes to get it across the finish line”

🚨 BREAKING: Top Basij commander, Fuqdis Immout, has fled Iran. I can confirm he is safe in Israel. Massive blow to the regime.